Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Somebody Stop Me

It seems to me that there are two contradictory ways in which Di Benedetto wants us, or at least allows us, to interpret Doctor Don Diego de Zama. On the one hand he is a weak, ambitious, Walter Mitty-ish fantasist who feels himself victimised by the rules of late 18th century Spanish colonialism. On the other hand he is the courageous, competent, champion of heroic ideals, a kind of Quixote of the pampas, who is determined to live up to his full potential in life.

This contradiction is the “duel” he fights in his head. He is simultaneously a failure and a success and he can’t decide which, if either, constitutes his authentic character. Regardless, what this internal conflict does show is that Zama is a man of some kind of conscience, a neurotic conscience certainly, but nevertheless with a reflective sense that is both historical and prospective.

Other things being equal, it is at least possible that Zama’s conscience could have matured with age and brought him some sort of psychological or spiritual equilibrium. But other things are never equal. Zama is what would be classified by some as an Objective Introvert (in the psychological typology of Carl Jung, for example). That is, although he is self-aware, he is also acutely sensitive to those around him. His primary judgments about himself come from elsewhere - his family, superiors, social betters, anyone he considers admirable. So Zama muses that :

“… [I cannot] modify what [I] once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future?… I saw the past as a shapeless, visceral mass, yet still somehow perfectible. It had its noble elements but among them I couldn’t help but recognize something—the main thing—that was viscous, unpleasant, and elusive to the grasp, like the intestines of a freshly disemboweled animal. I did not repudiate this element but accepted it as part of myself, possibly an indispensable part, even if I’d played no role in bringing it into existence. I hoped, rather, to be myself, at last, in the future, by dint of what I might become in that future. Perhaps I believed I was that man already, living in accordance with the image that awaited me further ahead. Perhaps this present Zama who claimed to resemble the Zama to come was built upon the Zama who once was, copying him, as if timidly venturing to interrupt something.”

Poor Zama. But, being a fellow Objective Introvert, I can confirm that Zama is, although in highly exaggerated form, the salt of the earth. Or, to put the matter less subjectively, he is the world’s cannon fodder. The domains of industry and commerce, of war and policing, of government and administration, couldn’t do without him. He is the perfect subordinate: loyal, attentive, hard-working, aspiring to get on by getting on with the boss, the perennial grey suited Organisation Man. He is, in other words (and I mean this is the kindest way possible), more or less insane. And he is a good century too early for appropriate therapy. Poor Zama.

Poor Zama. The only defence an Objective Introvert has against the world is the choice of those he has around him and whom he admires. He doesn’t know this, is of course, but their opinions are what drive him. Wrong people, then wrong judgments, and then you’re toast, mentally soeaking. So Zama is right to consider his past as shaping his future. He’s even right to want to limit what things he pays attention to:

’Acknowledging my own impassioned disposition, I must shun all stimuli that are contrived or deliberately pursued. There is no excuse when instinct has forewarned us but we do not heed the warning… I must not even lay eyes on them so as not to dream of them and render myself susceptible and bring about my downfall.”

But, poor Zama, he doesn’t have a clue that the the shaping of his personality done in the past has been done, and is still being done, not by his actions but by his associations, his relationships. And the maniac is still involving himself in the same associations and relationships he always has - those who purport to be better than he is. So by his (middle) age he is trapped. There is no escape as he waits helplessly for his own Godot, the illustrious viceroy, to appreciate him fully and give him the posting he deserves, away from the primitive plains of Paraguay to the boisterous ado of Buenos Aires.

Poor Zama. It ain’t going to happen. And even if by some fluke it does, Zama’s insanity would continue unabated. He would fixate on new aspirations, positions even higher up the social ladder, honours and titles for his valour in service to the sovereign. When the arbiter of worth lies elsewhere, there is always the need to get confirmation of one’s value through those who are perceived to have more of it. Those of lesser value - one’s subordinates, employees, even peers (he has no friends) and family members - don’t really exist for Zama except as abstractions. They may be treated badly as a matter of natural justice.

Poor Zama. He has become a snob, a racist, a misogynist, blatant social climber. His conscience has become a mere luxury in which he indulges from time to time. Otherwise it is silent, and he is ruthless. His inherent sensitivity, therefore, emerges as a constant self-pity and paranoia which justifies everything he does. There is no functional difference between Zama’s state of mind and an addiction to heroine. As he feeds it, the addiction becomes more demanding. The results are predictable.

Poor Zama. Hell, poor me!

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What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

God Sustains
(But not in a good way)

There are two kinds of people in the world: psychotics and neurotics. Psychotics are obsessed with changing others; neurotics with changing themselves. I myself am hopelessly neurotic; as, I suspect most people who are attracted to this book. We like reading about the interactions of psychotics and neurotics. It gives us a measure of comfort to know that we are not alone, that others have even more profound neuroses that we have. Our sympathy for their suffering is also amplified by our resentment about the psychopaths who are the cause of such suffering. Reading becomes a kind of neurotic therapy for neurotics.

Psychotics come in a variety of forms but share the ambition to exploit the world in ways passed on to them by psychotic parents, charlatans, voices, spirits, Republicans, or God. Psychotics want and use power as a matter of entitled right. Neurotics are also a variable lot but generally feel that they are defective in some way - genetically, perhaps as a matter of education or background, or psychologically if they feel they aren’t appreciated sufficiently, or even in terms of location if their place in the world is dangerous or merely uncomfortable.

It is mostly psychotics who run things and take advantage of the neurotics who want some form of change in themselves. Sometimes any change at all is welcomed by the neurotics. And neurotics are willing to pay almost anything to get. Or more accurately, to pay for the hope that things will change for the better, that their deficiencies will be compensated, that they will be transported either spiritually or physically to some other place. In short, that they will find happiness.

One of the strangest aspects of the relationships between psychotics and neurotics is that in the absence of psychotics, any group of neurotics will generate their own psychotics. They’re the ones who want to “do things properly.” One character in the novel summarises the situation nicely: “It amazed him, how much chaos people can put up with, so long as what needs doing gets done.” One thing neurotics have is an excess of opinion. So they can’t get much done. This allows neurotics to play neurotics off against one another, and even to organise neurotics to oppress other bands of neurotics also, of course, led by psychotics. Neurotics look to psychotics to correct the wrongs of other psychotics. This does not reduce the quantum of suffering but it does allow everyone to maintain their relative roles in life.

People smugglers are psychotics. So are most businessmen, politicians, and others who want power. Their victims are largely neurotics, who know what psychotics do, how they make their living through exploiting neurotics. Yet they throw themselves into the diabolical relationship like emigrants paying well-known crooks for transport on the high seas to some unspecified destination. Neurosis will not be denied even in the face of likely death by drowning. Children being conned in such a way is understandable. But adults? One thinks of other examples of this strange behaviour - young men signing up for the armed services and police, consuming high-sugar soft-drinks or high-salt burgers because they are what the Pepsi Generation does or because it will Give You Giggles, or voting for an arch-psychotic like Donald Trump. The list is endless really. Psychotics are bullies; neurotics are mugs. The dipole seems baked in to human society.

There is an equilibrium, therefore, in the eco-system of psychotics and neurotics. They thrive on one another. Sometimes psychotics form implicit alliances (the people smugglers and the border patrol guards who both oppress neurotic emigrants). Sometimes neurotics form alliances to combat psychotic regimes (thus necessarily becoming psychotic themselves like antifa and any number of ‘cancel culture’ groups). The relationship between psychotics and neurotics seems stable throughout history and across cultures. It appears as almost a divine law that each group maintain its role to the benefit of the whole. Or as many philosophers and one of the doomed characters in Omar El Akkad’s novel has it “God sustains.”

And obviously God does exactly that - in a manner remarkably like what he did for William Golding’s Pincher Martin, another neurotic seafarer.

Postscript: I have been discussing my comments with another GR reader privately. I think some clarifications are necessary: First, not all psychotics are psychopaths, who may be classed as extreme psychotics. But we are all on the spectrum of mental illness. Trying to escape from our condition by turning to psychopathy (the usual route) is a losing strategy. It pushes us more to the extreme of mental illness. I was reminded by my correspondent that the idea of the American abolitionist’s to the effect that “If one of us is unfree, all are slaves,” applies to our human condition in general. The hypothesis, not unique to me of course, is that placing oneself at the service of those even more neurotic than oneself is the only effective therapy for improving our position on the spectrum, in fact for moving the whole spectrum up a notch toward sanity. To paraphrase the abolitionists: “Either we all get a bit better or none of us do.”

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A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible by Kristin Swenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dangerous Love

The Bible is a literary object that, perhaps above all others, allows, often demands, interpretation. It is in fact a record of its own interpretive history in its distinctive styles, evolving narratives and changing historical concerns. It is consequently not surprising that the Bible has generated so many distinct, often mutually hostile, interpretive communities. The fact that each of these communities attempts to stop the process of interpretation is a negation of the primary message of the book itself.

Kristin Swenson unashamedly “loves the Bible.” And she does an outstanding job of introducing the literary complexity of the Bible’s contents (and its concomitant religious and theological density). Her approach is appreciative rather than critical, which gives her exposition a lightness I haven’t encountered anywhere else in such an ambitious overview. She does what she says on the tin: “This book looks squarely at what’s so weird, difficult, and disconcerting both about and in the Bible, and in the process shows how those qualities can actually enrich one’s relationship, religious or not, to the text.”

Yet Swenson’s exposition of the ‘openness’ of biblical meaning raises a rather significant point that she documents repeatedly but declines to address. The progressive editions and emendations of scriptural material are not random, nor are they the correction of past texts by some inspired scribe who had a better channel of communication to the Divine. These changes are always purposeful and their consistent purpose is to explain the unexpected events of contemporary recent history. In other words the Bible is a series of cumulative rationalisations of how we find ourselves in our present circumstances given that we are meant to be protected by a caring and merciful divinity.

So, when the residents of the kingdom of Judah were dispossessed in the 6th century BCE and carried off to Babylon, the sharp reduction in their standard of living had to be explained. Clearly an all-powerful God like YHWH would not allow such trauma without reason. A new interpretation of their religious tradition was necessary. And the reason was discovered after sufficient prayer and discussion. The Judahites had become lax in their divine observance and therefore their temple had been destroyed, and they expelled from their homeland.

But the re-interpretation of history went even further. The Babylonia exile was just the latest of a series of misfortunes for those committed to YHWH. Some might find this discouraging in their current condition of exile. It was necessary, then, to provide comfort that the world, creation itself, was not against them, something that had been rumoured in religious cults from the East. This is a rather fundamental issue and the result is a new introduction to all the other collected scriptures. We know this result as the first chapter of the Book of Genesis in which the Judahites are assured of the essential goodness of the world and thereby given renewed hope for the future.

The emerging Jewish sect of Jesus followers pursued the same tradition of ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ as their forebears. This was few centuries after Hebrew religious authorities had closed the book, as it were, on further interpretations of the Tanach or Jewish Bible. But the Christians found their feet in the literary genre surprisingly quickly. If anything the series of Christian rationalisations of events was even more dramatic than that of their Hebrew predecessors.

For example, the first gospel which was written down (but not the first Christian writing which was produced by Paul of Tarsus who had no personal knowledge of Jesus at all) is that of Mark. The earliest versions of Mark tell a story of Jesus’s life that ends rather abruptly with the deposit of his body in a stone tomb after his crucifixion for sedition. The tone of disappointment and sadness is unmistakable. Only later versions include any mention of a resurrection or subsequent earthly activities.

But by the time of the writing of the last gospel, that of John about 30 or so years later, Jesus has become the Word of God who has always existed and will continue to do so for eternity. And with the writing of the ‘final’ book of the Christian Bible, The Apocalypse, this same Jesus, the one who advocated meekness and mercy somewhat earlier in the biblical progression, is a divine figure of judgment and wrath on those who do not accept him as Lord of Creation. The ‘good news’ of universal salvation is now diluted to a small ‘remnant’ of humanity. Thus devotees were given hope that the failure of predictions by Jesus (and the ever-influential Paul) about the imminent Second Coming were not serious, a mere error in interpretation perhaps. Jesus would eventually return as promised with an extreme violence that the unbelievers will suffer in revenge for their unbelief regardless of the way they had lived their lives.

So, pacé Swenson, while the inexhaustibility of the Bible’s message is something that she would like fundamentalists as well as interested literate readers to appreciate, there is a danger, an element of evil, she appears to discount. The Bible can rationalise anything. It was constructed precisely by doing so and inherently encourages the practice among its committed readers. This is why it is so easy for otherwise illiterate but ambitious preachers and untold numbers of amateur moral experts to rationalise their rather unbiblical prejudices from slavery and misogyny to homo- and xenophobia. The prediction of the imminent end of the world put forward by various Christian sects have clearly been ill-founded. But rather than threaten the sects’ dissolution, failure has always generated a new interpretive analysis and ever greater enthusiasm for spreading the new interpretation abroad.*

These people aren’t necessarily stupid (although many undoubtedly are). They may not even been consciously ill-willed. Evil people rarely are; their greed, lust for power, violence, and other nasty behaviour is always rationalised as just and necessary. They know the Bible is open to interpretation. But more important they know from biblical history that they can use it to rationalise absolutely any view they care to put forward. When they can’t rationalise, they excise as with Luther’s rejection of the Epistle of James, Jesus’s brother, because it offended Luther’s Pauline interpretation of Christianity. The ruse is performed without shame, often with popular approval.

So, for example, the Catholic Church has employed biblical references to rationalise not just its policies but its authority to make such (sometimes murderous) policies against women leaders, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, colonial subjects, as well as its own dissenting members. Protestant sects have used it to simultaneously demand personal freedom while denying personal freedom to enslaved people, intuitive women (witches), pregnant women, gay people, and sex workers as well as other Christians. Totalitarian regimes use it to justify their excesses of power including torture, murder, and large-scale repression. Conservatives in democratic regimes use it to combat almost all progressive policies in education, racial equality, social welfare, military spending, and the judicial system.

The Bible is, then, a sort of training ground for the worst kind of human hypocrisy. It demonstrates what is possible through the re-writing of history, the deconstruction and inversion of concepts, and the invention of spin. In this sense the Bible does indeed show the relativity of not just history but all of human experience. But that is not what readers of the Bible have been taught to expect. Implicitly they already know that the Bible is a tool for enforcing and verifying conformity to some tribal or party-line. It can be quoted abundantly to attract power and to cause strife simply because it is so indefinite, so contradictory, so rich in meaning. And its status as ‘sacred’ means that it will be listened to, taken as gospel.

So I would love to love Swenson’s book as much as she loves the Bible. But I can’t because I don’t want yet more harm does in its name. As long as this collection of myths, legends, fragmentary histories, and religious insights carries the reputation of ‘sacred,’ it is a dangerous weapon to humanity… and beyond. Swenson’s book, therefore, might just be the vehicle for spreading the malaise.

* How can one resist the comparison between such biblical rationalisations and predictions and those of the present Republican Party in America? The My Pillow guy apparently has not lost any credibility among the Party faithful in light of either his fact-free conference or his several failed predictions of Trump triumphant. I don’t think it is at all an exaggeration to suggest that the Religion of the Book has been a how-to guide to this sort of insanity. And the audience doesn’t even need a warm-up; they’re primed from childhood.

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The Broom of the System 
by 

David Foster Wallace

 

Critical Problems on the Line

Could it be that Lenore Beadsman and Leopold Bloom have more in common than just their initials (Broom/Bloom, get the clue?)? Both are engaged in a fairly closely detailed tour of their respective cities. Both are described in and through a variety of literary styles, often comedic, digressions, and innovations. Both exist in order to demonstrate points about language as much as to carry the narrative along. And the auxiliary characters to both are a pretty rum lot of social freaks, incipient psychopaths, and grasping businessmen, sometimes simultaneously. I mean come on. How much proof do you need. Somebody’s a plagiarist, so’ ‘nuff.

Well no. Maybe these are coincidences. Leopold exists in a down to earth descriptive world that Lenore simply doesn’t share. Leoplod encounters genuine streets and authentic shops and pubs (look ‘em up!). Lenore exists in a universe that sustains corporate entities like Hunt & Peck, Stonecipheco, Rummage and Naw, or Frequent & Vigorous, the latter being merely a tax dodge masquerading as a publisher. These simply don’t exist in the telephone directory, much less Google maps. None of your modernist realism there. No way, José.

Then again, there is the determinism versus free will thing going on in both. And the associated questions of religion. Some subjects are just untalkaboutable as Leopold and Lenore each might say. Does that make these subjects spiritual, or nonsense, or maybe even Catholic? Not to mention the suggestions in the text that words aren’t often used in ‘official’ ways, in fact that there may be no official ways at all. Oh, and there’s lot of odd sex involved too. You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty creepy connection, all this primitive non-verbal stuff. That’s code, man, and no mistake.

Yeah, but there sure isn’t a lot of this telephone mixup business that Leopold ever had to deal with. I forget, did he even have a telephone? But Lenore finds it a major headache; it’s sort of central to her life. In fact her whole town suffers; it’s like a running joke. So Cleveland can’t be Dublin; Lake Erie ain’t the River Liffey no matter what anyone says to the contrary. And what would Lionel know about baby food, toxic or not? Bupkis is what Leopold would know about baby food. But Lenore was presumably brought up on the stuff and it’ll sure be a large part of her future. And there wasn’t even one cockatiel in Leoplold’s’s life, nowhere, ever. 

So I think I’m entitled to make a firm conclusion about the state of affairs here. Wallace never heard of Joyce. There, I’ve said it. I’m proud to be out of the closet. And for all those critics out there who never mentioned the two together, you left an important, if much needed, gap in the market to be filled. Remember: You read it here first

 

The Question of Hu 
by 

Jonathan D. Spence

 

The Worship of Words

On the face of it, this is an interesting if inconsequential history of a certain John Hu, a Christian Chinese gentleman brought to Europe as a sort of research assistant by a French Jesuit scholar, Père Jean-Francois Foucquet, in the early 18th century. The priest abandoned his protégé shortly after arrival and the stranded man spent the next two years in an asylum for the insane, a sort of Catholic Bedlam. His situation was made ever more intense because his carers/persecutors were fellow-Christians who treated him as somewhat less than fully human much less one of their own. One can only feel pity for this strange but guileless and innocent victim of a sort of naive xenophobia and cultural ignorance.

But there is also an historically significant substrate to this story that perhaps provides at least a partial explanation for the treatment afforded Mr. Hu and the further career of Pére Foucquet: language and its role in European religion, especially in Catholicism. Hu was brought to Europe by Foucquet in the midst of a crisis created in part by Foucquet and his Jesuit colleagues during decades of involvement in China. It is about how a rigidly textual religion translates, if at all, to an entirely alien language. This crisis was less public or dramatic than the Protestant Reformation 200 years earlier but no less significant for the Catholic Church. This crisis is generally known as Inculturation and would continue for at least the next two centuries. It is still not been entirely resolved.

Inculturation is a complex, often esoteric theological topic. It involves not just the definition and designation of terms but also the subtle connotations and traditions associated with these terms. At the time of Mr. Hu’s journey, inculturation was triggered by the unclear status of the so-called Chinese Rites involving the veneration of ancestors. Were established rituals religious, and therefore unacceptable in Christianity, or merely civil, in which case they could be practised by those accepted into the Christian Church? But this issue was the exposed tip of a very large theological iceberg. The same issue persists today regarding the status of economic injustice in the so-called Liberation Theology of South America. Should such injustice be considered as a civil matter or a religious scandal? To make the problem of inculturation simpler without making it trivial, I think a personal example may be useful.

I first heard the now famous Missa Luba, a musical setting of the formal or High Latin Mass, in the early 1960’s. The Missa Luba is an enduring masterpiece, a magnificent interpretation by a Congolese ensemble of all the key elements of the Catholic ceremony. It was also totally unlike any traditional liturgical music in the Catholic Church at the time (and substantially predates the sort of guitar-accompanied Kumbaya drivel composed by aspiring clerics - mostly nuns apparently - after the reforms of Vatican II). Neither the staid Gregorian chants nor the Baroque polyphonies had nearly the rousing appeal nor the emotional connection with the Catholic audience of teenagers of which I was a part.

The Kyrie alone, that very primitive, repetitive prayer for mercy, became in the Missa Luba a theme that could have come straight from a pagan festival (It was even cited as such in the cult 60’s film “if”). It was neither staid nor soaring but in some way as primitive as the prayer itself. It had a force, a direction, a meaning that none of us had previously experienced with liturgical music. And whenever I hear the Sanctus from the Missa Luba, I am reminded of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by its percussive ostinato. We played the vinyl recording over and over in our little group until it became almost unusable.

None of us realised at the time that we had entered right into the middle of the problem of inculturation. The piece was made by and for Africans. It was sectarian by definition; it derived from a tradition that had no connection at all to the European styles of music that had dominated Catholicism. The fact that it had popular appeal around the world made the situation worse. Its interpretation of divine truths inherently gave it the potential to undermine settled issues, theological as well as liturgical.*

In short, the music gave the words new meaning. This outraged traditionalists. Inculturation was a linguistic not a musical issue. The words and their established meanings, their connections to other words in the form of defined doctrines, are central to Catholicism, as they are to all Christian sects. Change the meaning of the words, that is, how the words are responded to by congregants, specifically European and other white congregants, and the great edifice of religious doctrine is threatened. The Missa Luba was perceived as the start of a very steep, very slippery slope by the church officials we were involved with. So, they confiscated the recording and warned us of its threat to the true faith.

Imagine, therefore, the official reaction in an even more conservative era to the research into Chinese religious texts by Père Foucquet when, as Spence summarises:

“In the twenty-two years that Foucquet has been in China, he has given much of his life to proving the truth of three fundamental insights that have been granted to him: first, that the origins of the ancient Chinese religious texts, such as The Book of Changes, are divine, that they were handed to the Chinese by the true God; second, that in China’s sacred books the word for the “Way”—the “Dao”—represented the same true God that Christians worship; third, that the same divine significance could be read into the Chinese philosophical phrase the “Taiji,” used in so many texts to refer to an ultimate truth.”

If one were dealing with typical linguistic or sociological inquiry, Foucquet’s hypothesis, although highly suspect, might be an interesting and culturally reconciling subject of investigation. That the Chinese purportedly discovered many of the same spiritual insights as Europeans is an important proposition. Among other things, if verified, it would give Christian missionaries conceptual and cultural entree for discussion and proselytisation in what had hitherto been a very tough, resistant, and unprofitable religious market.

But this apparently pragmatic hypothesis hides a sinister implication. If Christian ideas can be mapped to Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist ideas, these latter can in fact dilute Christian truth. Each of the Chinese concepts are part of an enormous tradition (Foucquet had several thousand Chinese volumes from which he selected his ‘target’ similarities). Therefore they are defined and derive their meaning through these alien texts and the traditions that have developed around them. If Foucquet’s conclusions are allowed to go unchallenged, Catholic doctrine will be potentially submerged by and compromised under the interpretive weight of these Chinese texts. If the words of doctrine aren’t kept from such contamination, the true faith might be lost.

Such concerns had been expressed for at least a century before the voyage of Hu and Foucquet to Europe. The Church’s initial expansion in Europe had largely been facilitated by the existence of the Roman Empire which exercised a sort of cultural magnetism that accepted the Church’s very Roman linguistic realism and dogmatic precision. But the systematic dispersion of missionaries into large populations with established cultures in South and Central America, but particularly in Japan, India and China produced this central issue unexpectedly. Policy vacillated continuously. On the one hand, Christian truth was thought to be a-cultural. Wasn’t this implied in the epithet Catholic? On the other hand non-European cultures, especially languages seemed incapable of conveying that truth reliably. 

The Church was unable either to absorb or overcome the Eastern cultures of Buddhism, Dao, and Confucianism (in others they had partial success producing syncretistic voodoo-like religious sects in parallel with more orthodox establishments). The Church’s implicit strategy seems to have been to replace these cultures entirely by insisting that Christianity must be received as an entire linguistic whole; or not at all and allow activities to be closed down completely. 

So, for example suggestions by missionaries throughout the 17th century that Chinese ancestor worship was a parallel practice to Catholic participation in the Community of Saints was rejected as quasi-heretical. Shortly after Foucquet’s departure, the Chinese emperor banned further missionary work in the country for precisely this reason, rejection being perceived as a profound lack of respect for Chinese tradtion. Not until 1939 was there a papal pronouncement that perhaps that particular similarity might have merit in catechesis.

In other words, the cultures of the East were implicitly considered a real threat to the very core of the Church, its treasury of doctrine. These doctrines, as well as various other texts like the Bible and papal instructions, were (and still are) formulated in carefully crafted Latin and essentially imposed on the various European languages (along with alphabets, vocabularies, and official translations as necessary). No such possibility existed in the East. The missionaries who did try to ‘connect’ cultural ideas were consistently blocked by central authority and their missions consistently failed except in those places which became European colonies, and not always even there.

So the Eastern religious ideas were not only alien, they were constitutionally wrong. They did not describe spiritual or supernatural reality. Those who practised these alien religions did not understand reality. Their languages weren’t even capable of describing reality accurately. In short, the people who spoke these languages were irrational, functionally insane from a Christian perspective. And their resolute unresponsiveness to proselytisation proved the point. They were incapable of understanding. Even those who appeared to accept Christian truths, couldn’t be considered Christians unless they could express those truths in an acceptable language.

Hence Mr. Hu’s (and also Pėre Foucquet’s) tragic situation. Hu was one of the few Chinese whom Europeans knew in the flesh, and the only one of an even fewer number who spoke no European language whatsoever. He was not just alien; he would likely be instinctively classed as pagan despite his putative baptism. In addition Hu was what might be called a religious enthusiast, very much attuned to visions and the visible acts of God, somewhat of an 18th century hippie child of God perhaps. His behaviour was simply odd during the voyage, moving toward the eccentric and even bizarre as he was exposed to European life.

Foucquet himself suffered less physically upon arrival but possibly experienced an equal degree of mental torture. His summons to Rome was in order to debrief the Vatican authorities on his remarkable findings before starting a sort of sabbatical in order the complete his writing. He reports an affable meeting with the Pope, which apparently didn’t touch upon the issue of the Chinese Rites or his controversial research about how “the Chinese had, in the long distant past worshipped the Christian God.” 

I think there’s a very strong possibility that senior officials had decided to bury the issue. What to do with a problematic figure like Foucquet then? He was a dedicated, well-connected scholar from a good family and with a number of friends sympathetic to his views. It was not clear that he was heretical by contravening any particular doctrine, but he had already said that his only goal in life was the completion of the exposition of his monumental thesis. But his views on the translation and meaning of Chinese texts were certainly divisive within the Jesuit community and with the other clerical orders, particularly the Dominicans. In addition his contention that Christianity could be preached through classic Chinese texts had already proved moot. The Catholic mission had already failed with the missionaries expulsion.

Better to avoid fuss and possible scandal then, and kick the man upstairs. The solution is typical of any large corporate organisation. They let Foucquet publish the first of his intended volumes about the origins of Chinese religions in biblical events. It was a dead letter in any case. Then they promoted him to an honorary bishopric with duties that absorb any free time for further writing. And then they just wait until things out until his retirement or death, whatever comes first. This was an institution with a rather long planning horizon after all.

Foucquet’s intended life’s work was clearly in those unwritten volumes. Almost half his life had been spent in his endeavour. It was now merely crates full of notes and Chinese reference works that eventually found their way to the King’s library. Foucquet, like Hu, was caught in the intense linguistic imperialism of the European Church and subtly but decisively put out to pasture.


* An old theological joke comes to mind. Question: How can you tell a liturgist from a terrorist? Answer: The terrorist is willing to compromise.

 

African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Martyrs for Hope

There are no African-American Christian martyrs. There are many ancient Christian martyrs (who knows, some may have been African), a large number of martyrs among Christian missionaries to European colonies (certainly almost all white folk), a few dozen Protestant and Catholic martyrs of the Reformation (black folk missed that one altogether), somewhat fewer recognised as the martyrs of various totalitarian regimes in the 20th century (others too get murdered for being identifiably different from the dominant group). There is even a basilica in Africa in honour of the twenty-two African Christians killed for their faith in the 19th century.

Yet despite the thousands of (known) deaths among African-Americans by lynching, mob and police brutality, judicial prejudice, or pure social neglect by the dominant white culture, there are none who are recognised as dying for their faith - even those killed in churches while they prayed. Why? I think Glaude offers a clue when he cites the 20th century black theologian, Howard Thurman:

“… the slave dared to redeem the religion profaned in his midst, he offered a particular understanding of black Christianity: this expression of Christianity was not the idolatrous embrace of Christian doctrine that justified the superiority of white people and the subordination of black people. Instead, black Christianity embraced the liberating power of Jesus’s example.”

At the risk of offending a very large segment of African-American Christians, not to mention Christians in general, I suggest that what Thurman is saying is that African American religion is something different than that derived from the Pauline tradition of professed dedication to a text, either biblical or dogmatic. This is a Christianity of practice, not belief in the sense of credal assertion of a set of orthodox opinions. Glaude confirms this explicitly: “I view African American religion as a practice of freedom.”

This non-doctrinal character of African-American religion is at least a partial explanation of why there are no African-American martyrs. Those black Americans who lost there lives didn’t do so proclaiming a belief in propositions of faith. They died in the name of hope not faith. This, I think, might be what Glaude calls “the specific inflection of Christianity in the hands of those who lived as slaves.”

Hope does not reside in propositions or credal statements. Hope, like Love and unlike Faith, is a practice. Hope is un-dogmatic about its intentions. It will accept ‘deliverance,’ or ‘salvation,’ or ‘rescue,’ or simply ‘comfort’ as its end without trying to make a distinction among them. That is, Hope is a confidence that there will be a change in the world but it has no particular object.

This is the example of Jesus. Even when he feels forsaken, he doesn’t despair but maintains Hope: simple undogmatic, perhaps even content-free confidence that the future is worthwhile even in his misery. Glaude puts it this way: “… my approach to African American religion insists on its open-ended orientation… that ‘all is not settled.’” Exactly. What ‘settlement’ might look like is completely “open-ended.” This is a religion of undisclosed, hidden promise. In this sense, it is pre-Pauline, that is to say, Judaic (also a genetically based religion of Hope and physical difference).

Faith is ritualistic; it is a matter of words and submission to words. Hope is an entirely different kind of religious practice. Glaud quotes the black sociologist W. E. B. DuBois about the three things that characterise African-American religious practice: “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy.” Each of these is distinctive, the last most dramatically: “The frenzy (the shouting), for Du Bois, captures that delicate balance between joy and terror that shadows black life in the United States. It is the eruption of the spirit in ordinary time that assures the presence of God amid the absurdity of white supremacy.”

Hope is, I think, what Glaude means by “the sign of difference” in African American religion. Hope is an antidote to absurdity (and therefore even an antidote to faith according to Tertullian). It nullifies or cancels the existence of a hostile and oppressive current world-order. Hope trusts nothing except itself. Not institutions, not people, and, in the midst of the eruption of the spirit, not even words of prayer. This is what Glaude calls “the site for self-creation and for communal advancement with political implication.”

Faith is something one can inquire about and use as a sign of membership or political affiliation. Sometimes people are killed for this affiliation. Hope is a different expression altogether - non-verbal, unpolitical, transcendent one might say. But Hope is apparent in behaviour - an attitude of independence, a willingness to engage, an acceptance of compromise, and a demonstrated tolerance for change and uncertainty. This behaviour makes some people outside what might be called the Community of Hope, (which is much larger than a church congregation) annoyed, resentful, and even homicidally hateful. Unlike faith, it can neither be questioned nor argued against. It persists in silence rather than proclaiming itself. And those who die in Hope do so unrecognised.

Thus, no African-American martyrs. We can only hope the killing stops.

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The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In Praise of Method

This book says many sensible things. That knowledge is something social, that truth is a matter of agreement, that such agreement has been compromised by modern technology, that error and uncertainty is what produces new knowledge, and that the only way in which we will be able to re-capture a communal appreciation of the truth is through the creation of appropriate institutions of inquiry that respect this error and uncertainty. The author’s recognition that what appears to be an issue of factuality in society is really a political problem is absolutely correct. But his proposal for how to address this problem is neither institutional nor political but rather personal and psychological. So, seriously short of anything serious.

Rauch’s focus is on what is traditionally called method, those things we need to do in order to distinguish the correct from the bogus. The adjective ‘scientific’ is usually applied in order to indicate a concern with the material rather spiritual, and to suggest an intellectual rather than technical programme. Scientific method has been an esoteric topic of discussion among philosophers and theoretical scientists for centuries. The emergence of Trump and his Politics of the Lie has made scientific method a much more popular subject. The issue at stake is what constitutes a valid result or statement, something that can (loosely) be called the ‘truth.’

It turns out that there is no such thing as a unique scientific method. There are, instead, many different methods proposed and accepted over time and across disciplines to establish normative rules for research and to verify and validate the results of inquiry. The rules of inquiry that apply to mathematicians are not the same as those of biologists, for example. Hegel had very different rules than Kant or Hume in philosophy. And the rules for what is considered good physics today are not the same as those of 100 years ago. The fact that methods vary and change is a hint at their political origin.

Rauch traces the the issue of method to Plato. But I think the 17th century philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, was arguably the first person to suggest that all personal knowledge is fragmentary, incomplete, and likely misleading. And it was the American, Charles Sanders Peirce, who took the implication of this insight and proposed that authentic knowledge was a communal affair among those expert in their fields. For Peirce, the expert community sets the standards to judge not just the competence of individual researchers but also what constitutes a fact produced through their inquiry.

More recent thinkers like Jürgen Habermas have extended the scope of Peirce’s thinking to include not just science but all inquiry, including the larger community of non-experts as well. In doing so, these thinkers inevitably conclude that inquiry of any kind at all is initiated, guided, and judged in a political process. In the ideal, this process should be accessible - in terms of both information and influence - by all those affected by decisions of the community. In other words the argument about the rules of inquiry must be as close to universal as we can make it.

Universal participation in inquiry is a tall order. The issue involves not just governmental politics but also participation in all the specialised expert communities. How is it possible for non-physicists, who know nothing about quantum mechanics, for example, to participate in decision-making of the discipline? In fact, of course, such participation is already commonplace as any politician on a national scientific research appropriations committee already knows. Because of problems that are all too well known in democratic societies - political expediency, pork-barrelling, lobby-funded campaigning, as well as direct and indirect fraud - this sort of participation doesn’t approach Habermas’s ideal. The main impediment is the asymmetric power relationships that permeate society, especially in typical politics.

The rise of the internet was looked upon by many as a way to allow just the sort of enlarged participation that people like Habermas had in mind. The internet was, it was touted, a way to level the playing field so that authority of all types - governmental, scientific, and professional - could be made more ‘transparent’ and more accountable. What has come as a surprise to many in recent years is that the new communications technologies - social, transactional, and research-oriented - have created a tension and ultimately a rift between the Peircean expert communities and the larger, really universal, community of a Habermas.

The politics of these two types of communities are entirely different. Expert communities - of scientists, doctors, lawyers, business people, engineers, information specialists, journalists and so on ad infinitum - are formed through credentials and a process of accreditation, and maintained by institutions which enforce standards of membership. The ‘social’ communities of the internet are, on the other hand, only marginally institutionalised. They are generally open to anyone who desires to participate without restriction except for egregious flouting of general social norms (Rauch calls them “insurgencies”). Put in slightly different terms, the hierarchies of authority in existing institutions (and they almost always are hierarchical, with someone at the apex with whom the buck stops) are being challenged by newly forming political associations, many with their own hierarchies and all with their own politics of method and truth.

So the so-called epistemological crisis - a fundamental uncertainty about what constitutes a fact - arises because of this political divergence. Whatever social, economic, or cultural conditions cause such political expressions are another matter. Our status quo at the moment is a battle between relatively non-institutionalised, technologically assisted populism (of the Left as well as the Right) versus the established institutions of epistemic power. This is not news. It is a re-run, for example, of the Protestant Reformation and its reliance on the technology of printing, an event at least as profound in its creation of uncertainty and social division.

And just as in the 16th century, the issue now is one of who has the ultimate authority over language? Who can claim their words are more than words, that they refer to things that are not words unambiguously? Historically, the resistance movement against those with the power to control the relation between words and non-words has shifted. The Enlightenment pushed authority away from religious institutions toward scientific ones. But the war never ended with a few cultural wins by science. Today’s Evangelicals, for example, are carrying out a strategy to regain control over language in every field from biology to the law. Meanwhile the Left is practising their own version of anti-Enlightenment language control with the fervour of a secular fundamentalism.

Rauch thinks that the problem of epistemological insurgency can be effectively addressed by (re)establishing what he calls our Constitution of Knowledge: “… liberalism’s epistemic operating system: our social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge.” And he is rather specific in the method he thinks appropriate. He believes that there are

“… two rules on which the modern liberal epistemic order—what I call “liberal science”—is founded: no final say and no personal authority. I argued that wherever people adhere to those rules, they will form a community of error-seeking inquirers accountable to each other but never to any particular authority, and knowledge will arise from their hive-like, largely self-organizing activities.”

These two rules are not dissimilar to those of Habermas in their obvious intention to broaden participation and to mitigate asymmetries of power. And arguably they are rules that are involved in some of the best scientific inquiry, which is always tentative and always subject to the scrutiny of one’s peers rather than of one’s superiors. In fact, the two rules probably imply one another.

But to whom are these methodological proposals being made? Certainly not to the head of the National Science Foundation contemplating this year’s research grants. Or to the head of the American Medical association considering some additions to the code of medical ethics. Or to a politician whose first rule of existence is the maintenance of her/his power and authority. Or to a civil servant who has a legal obligation to use authority to enforce conformity with the law.

The proposals not only ignore the reality of institutional life, their execution would also destroy the institutions in which they’re adopted. Isn’t this obvious without further need for argument? No corporate organisation, no official entity, no political party, no professional body could maintain its existence if these two rules were adopted, voluntarily or not.

But the rot goes even deeper. Just think of the examples - in science, in government, in corporate life - in which both decisiveness and personal authority are essential for survival not just a better political result. The rapid development of the COVID-19 serums around the world were a highly directed R&D undertaking. As are governmental responses to natural disasters. Yet their effectiveness is dependent upon breaking the rules Rauch wants in place universally.

And what about the poor man in the street whom Rauch thinks will benefit by these methodological principles? Do they in any way whatsoever help him distinguish between Trumpian pseudo-facts and the latest news of Chinese economic growth? Joe Average is at the base of the epistemological pile. He/she is already subject to a barrage of unfinished/contradictory/impenetrable stories. And certainly she/he has no personal authority to speak of in the matter.

Finally, Rauch seems oblivious to the logical paradox of self-referentiality in which his Constitution is entrapped. When his two rules are applied to his own thoughts, it should be apparent to him that he cannot abjure authority and take it simultaneously. Neither can he claim finality for these rules and advocate a continuing search for the ways to find truth. His thesis is inherently contradictory, and most of what he has to say is a sort of hand-waving to prevent the rest of us from noticing.

At best, therefore, what Rauch is recommending is an attitude of intellectual humility. His rules might just as well be stated in euphemistic exhortations like “Keep an open mind,” “Don’t rush to conclusions,” and “Be doubly sure of things before you drink the hemlock.” Certainly not the kind of insight sufficient to reveal Trumpian mendacity much less promote institutional transformation.

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Under the Glacier 
by 

Halldór Laxness, 

 

Magnus Magnusson (Translator)

 

Yessing on the In-breath

I knew Laxness could be wonderfully ironic, even creatively sarcastic. But I never imagined he could be a comic writer, and a first class one at that. The Icelandic Stanley Elkin perhaps.

The comparison is not all that far-fetched. Icelanders are like a lost tribe of Danes. Nominally Lutheran, only God knows what strange practices they get up to cut off in the hinterland of moors, lava fields and mountains. There are rumours that a sort of Nordic Voodoo reigns among the sparse population. The bishop is concerned. A one-man Inquisition (Emissary of the Bishop, EmBi for short, also known as ‘the undersigned’) is sent out to investigate and report on the state of religious health.

Like Voodoo, the local cults are syncretistic and somewhat ill-defined dogmatically. Their talismans and rituals are purely pragmatic though. If you can repair a Primus stove, or shoe a horse, or fix a carburettor, or rig up a 240 volt circuit you’re a saver of souls and a high priest.

This doesn’t mean that the spiritual is unregarded amongst the natives. These are not crass materialists (although they recently have received the luxury of alternating current). The place, sitting at the base of the great Snæfellsjökull, the omphalos and fiery source of Icelandic existence, is so overwhelming that it’s impossible not to perceive some sort of higher power, or at least one’s own powerlessness . So thoughts of the supernatural tend to run toward the great volcano and its glacier with a few old (fractured) Nordic sagas thrown in to explain things coherently (or at least poetically).

To call the devotees of this non-faith in the wilderness tight-lipped would be an understatement. They may speak the same language as the bishop in Reykjavík but they don’t speak it freely. A snatch of a typical conversation with the emissary:

“Embi: Are you Tumi Jónsen, clerk of the congregation?
Farmer: So they say. I’m only passing on what I’ve been told.”
“Embi: So you are the parish clerk?
Tumi Jónsen: You can put a name to anything, my boy.”

Such a population is naturally un-dogmatic in religious matters. But their religious views would hardly be noticeable even if they were fundamentalists. As one of the local myth-bearers,the parish clerk, puts it: “My ancestors, the Jónsens, believed everything in the Icelandic sagas and I go along with them sort of more or less, though I am not the man my father and my forefathers were.”

Pastor Jón has nailed the church shut and allowed the locals to take the pews for emergency firewood (and the pulpit, but not all of that was needed). His congregation loves him. When confronted with the accusation that he doesn’t conduct services even for Christmas, his reply is entirely matter-of-fact:

“Pastor Jón: That which is beyond words remains silent at Christmas too, my friend. But the glacier is there, all right.
Embi: No revelation?
Pastor Jón: The lilies of the field.
Embi: Yes, the lilies of the field! Exactly! Isn’t it ideal to preach about them—at Christmas, for instance?
Pastor Jón: Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.”

The natives are correct when they say that “There’s nothing much happens around here. Nothing ever happens to anyone. No one has ever seen anything.”Nothing, in any case, that could possibly interest those who think that they can capture in words what is really important to these people.

 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Are You Serious, Matt?

Could it be true that clinical depression arises from bad choices and disappointments; or is it more likely the other way round? Or is it the case that depression is a consequence of environment, one’s less than sane immediate family perhaps; or possibly genetics, an historical aberration passed down from family far distant in space and time? Is the world an objectively depressing place; or made so by our attitude towards it? The philosopher Schopenhauer thought depression was an heroic human condition and promoted it by writing about it; Freud thought it was an illness and tried to cure it by talking about it.

Haig thinks depression has something to do with regrets, that is, thoughts about what might have been if we had done things differently. And perhaps he has a point. In his view, regrets occur because of alternative histories we fabricate for ourselves in which disappointment with one’s lot is reduced or eliminated because life would be more fulfilling/successful/happy than the life one actually has. Depression, in other words, is a literary phenomenon. It’s a result of the what-if stories. Imaginative, articulate people, therefore, would be particularly susceptible to the condition. There is in fact substantial anecdotal evidence that this might be so (see, for example, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Based on this essentially linguistic theory of depression, Haig has a suggestion for therapy. At this point he crosses the line from playful fictional speculation to a less than savoury quackery worthy of Ayn Rand and Tim LaHaye. Haig thinks that some down-to-earth horror stories are just the thing to augment the happily-ever-after alternatives in our heads. Re-write the script, he implies, picking up all the tiny contra-indications of bliss because “undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.” Or just remember that people, jobs, relationships, and desires change. Perhaps what was the case about these things when the alternative history was written hadn’t persisted. Or the outcomes remain the same despite different choices. Haig’s point, I suppose, is that things could be worse; that maybe Leibniz had it right: this world could be the best of all possible worlds. Disappointment with one’s regrets as a cure for regrets, and therefore a therapy for disabling, suicidal depression?

Things could be worse!? That’s your therapeutic message? Are you serious, Matt?

Haig even makes a pitch for a sort of group therapy in which those formulating alternatives to the alternatives get together for solace and encouragement. And of course he feels compelled to bring in quantum mechanics to bolster the non-literary reality of simultaneous lives - a cliché I was mightily hoping he might avoid. And the allusion to YHWH as the master of ceremonies (very Leibnizian), in the guise of a benevolent librarian, keeping all the disparate quantum selves in line is pretty cheesy. Ultimately Haig opts for the cheesiest of all criterion for the story one must have about one’s life: authenticity, we must be our realest, bestest, truest self. “Aim to be the truest version of you,” the godly librarian suggests, as if a depressive has a choice in the matter. I think Haig may have been to one too many EST seminars, or at least spent too much time in Southern California reading Heidegger on the beach.

Of course in creating these new personal stories another issue eventually arises if one’s authentic self is the depressed wreck one started with. Then “It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from,” says Haig’s protagonist, brought back from the brink of suicidal death. But the important point, according to Haig, is “You just had to never give up on the idea that there would be a life somewhere that could be enjoyed.” Can one help thinking of Eric Idle’s magnificent rendition of ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ in the Life Of Brian? Did I mention cheesy.

I think it clear that The Midnight Library is a grave insult to those suffering from depression. It is a facile, trivial, misdirected, and (did I mention?) cheesy book. Am I entirely off-base in thinking Haig wrote it as a feel-good piece for those who just need a little pat on the back for their recovery from a bout of the blues, or a failed love affair? If not, you’re a louse, Matt.

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Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I Did It My Way

I had a bum gall bladder for about 20 years. Twice a year I would provoke the thing to pass stones after a dose of anchovies or other purine-rich delights. I am told by several women-sufferers of the condition that the pain is comparable to that of childbirth. In my case it would often last three days with no respite, no sleep, and frequently no hope except for oblivion. Eventually, after specialist medical counsel, I had the offending organ removed. No problems since, although I do feel a little dread every time I sense a little heartburn coming on.

I recount this piece of medical history because although I have experienced the pain, and indeed degradation, of bodily disfunction, I don’t consider myself in any way qualified to give advice on the subject. I have much sympathy for fellow-sufferers and urge them to seek help when I’m aware of a need. But I would never suggest a treatment to someone else, particularly not in the middle of an attack. The likely response would be about the same as a woman in labour: ‘F-off and get this to stop!’

Matt Haig has a very different opinion of both himself and medicine than I do. He has gone through some pretty tough times. In his mid-twenties he suddenly developed acute depression that led him literally to the edge of suicide. His pain and despair were intense. His memoir is a blow-by-blow of the stages of his condition, his feelings and thoughts as it progressed, and his ultimate emergence from what many describe as a complete loss of self. His account serves two purposes he says: to publicise the character of the condition in the hope of reducing the stigma sometimes attached to it; and to use his skill as a writer to articulate his own experience as part of his own therapy. Both are laudable intentions.

But Haig, unfortunately, goes considerably beyond these intentions in offering advice and counsel to those suffering similar affliction. And it is here that I think he does a disservice to the rest of us as well as himself. Haig seems to believe that the way you should deal with people who have lost any reason to stay alive, the most dramatic symptom of depression, is to provide them reasons for staying alive. Yet he is very aware that people in severe pain don’t want his advice: “If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.” But Haig carries on regardless in what seems like self-obsession.

Like other cases of depression, Haig’s is probably unique. Among other things he was desperately frightened of taking the drugs that might have helped him. This makes some sense since his condition likely may have been provoked by one drug in particular - alcohol. He considers himself fortunate to have recovered without meds because he was able to feel “very in tune” with himself during the process. His message from this side of his ordeal is pretty clear if more than a bit unexpected. Not ‘lay off the booze, it could catch up with you.’ Rather, ‘avoid the therapeutic drugs; they may not work, they’re addictive, and they deplete your inner resources for dealing with the malady.’ A sort of pep talk for lickin’ the thing like a real man.

Haig thinks that depression is the result of the mind lying to itself, about itself and about its future. According to Haig, the lying is mainly about self-worth - how disappointing he has been to those who live him and to himself in terms of potential. This is an interesting idea. It takes the essence of what we typically mean by ‘mind,’ namely conscious reflectiveness, and makes it its own worst enemy, an ultimate auto-immune condition, mental AIDS, only a lot more mysterious.

But then Haig ignores this interesting idea in favour of another suggestion: “All we can do, for the moment, is really all we need to do – listen to ourselves.” Yup, listen to our lying selfs. That’ll get us through. Haig claims “in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.” Flying solo. Listening to that inner auto-pilot who just led us to the brink of destruction. What could go wrong?

Haig’s auto-pilot in fact has a very rigid philosophical (or religious) programme: “It is a hard thing to accept, that death and decay and everything bad leads to everything good, but I for one believe it.” The defensiveness in the remark is obvious. He has no reason to believe this. It is literally a matter of faith which he needs in order to provide himself reasons for living. What he fears most, perhaps, is that this faith is a lie. To admit the possibility of the Gnostic conviction about utter corruption of the world would destroy his happy ending. So he won’t even consider it, even though he thinks, “The world is increasingly designed to depress us.” The Good is out there somewhere. It’s elusiveness is just part of its goodness apparently. Looking on the bright side is a therapeutic suggestion that is as impossible as it is trivial.

Love and books are what saved Haig, especially the latter and especially books about or by fellow-depressives. In other words things that allowed him to feel less alone. Other things - travel, running - fit into this basic therapeutic regime. But within this, there is the macho Haig, determined to beat this thing on his own: “each time I forced myself out there in the cold grey damp of a West Yorkshire morning, and pushed myself to run for an hour, it gave me a little bit of depression-beating power. A little bit of that ‘you’d better be careful with who you are messing with’ spirit.” His not infrequent suggestions that overcoming depression involves an act of will are… well, depressing.

Don’t get me wrong. Haig’s descriptions of his breakdown and what he went through subsequently are an important case study. But his suggestions, implicit as well as explicit, about how to deal with depression range from the trivial (eat well) to the absurd (tell yourself better stories), and sound like whistling in the dark. Haig says he has benefitted therapeutically by writing the book. I believe him. But being a depressive doesn’t make one an expert on depression. Yet Haig subsequently wrote a novel (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) putting forth every one of his ‘tenets’ for successfully overcoming the condition.

Looking on the bright side, Haig’s memoir has convinced me not to continue with my book on gall stones and their meaning in the cosmos. I hope the world will not be less without it. It is after all a much needed gap in the market.

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Essayism by Brian Dillon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Bag of Bags

An essay on essays. Actually a number of essays on different aspects of the essay. Or, perhaps more accurately still, a revelation of the shape and contents of Brian Dillon’s mind through a literary bag of essays.

Ultimately isn’t that what an essay is? A fragment in formless form of literal self expression in terms of an object, an event, a feeling, a property, or idea? Put enough of these fragments together and the self who produced them begins to emerge like an image on old fashioned photo paper. Dillon demonstrates rather than defines the form.

If what Dillon suggests is true, that the essay is a sort of measurement, a proposition perhaps, of something of importance, something of unrecognised but real value, then what else could an essay convey but the most intimate thoughts of the writer. This is so even if the subject is abstract or arcane because the author has to take some stand; he/she has to evaluate and come to a conclusion.

The need for a conclusion which is not conclusive implies a certain vulnerability which doesn’t occur in fiction or in more narrow (formally disciplined?) factual reporting like scientific papers. The essay brings something to noticeability; it doesn’t prove or discredit.

The one thing an essay can’t be if it is to be a success is uninteresting, that is to say, repetitive or entirely derivative. An essay does not summarise or engage in polemics. It shares with poetry the requirement to make connections where there were previously none. It takes what may be familiar and makes it just slightly less so. It offers; it doesn’t demand.

Dillon quotes Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities about the psychology of essay-writing:

“The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete. He suggests that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted…. Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.”

I think he’s correct. The essay demands a certain cast of mind (training? personality?) which includes a kind of self doubt. It is not meant to convince the reader but to change the author, to move the writer a step closer to something vaguely called the truth. Montaigne, arguably the pinnacle of the trade, makes the point clearly:

“What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.”

Dillon says about himself that “Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two.” I understand that limitation quite well because I share it. But his ability to thread those fragments together into a coherent whole is remarkable. What emerges for me is a cultivated, witty, humble, self-aware man whom, and whose works, I want to know much more about.

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The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Failure To Launch

I’m not sure how author/songwriter/bandleader, Willy Vlautin, wants us to perceive his protagonist, Lynette, an early thirties three-job hustler. Courageous? Hapless? Victim? Self-sacrificing? Psychotic? Or a representative of a class that is systematically being ground down by the success of others?

Lynette is most certainly unlucky. A narcissistic mother, exploitative father, severely mentally disabled brother, as well as several frenemies who try to do her in one way or another constitute her social milieu. She’s like the Peanuts cartoon character, Pigpen, raising the dust of chaos wherever she goes.

We get to know a lot about the topography of Portland Oregon, and gig posters for small-time local bands, but very little about Lynette’s logical processes. Perhaps she has none. Obsessed with a desire to move up the social ladder to middle-class home ownership, she is committed to hard work… along with prostitution, grand theft, burglary, drug-dealing, and GBH. Lynette apparently never thinks about consequences but merely reacts impulsively to anything beyond her obsession.

Lynette clearly suffers from depression, probably drug and alcohol-induced. Her obsession is a kind of therapy, I suppose, that keeps her mind off her condition… until it doesn’t. Unaccountably, at that point she decides to do a clear out of her house before skipping town ahead of a posse of folk who’d like to string her up.

By then the reader is forced to recognise the truth: Lynette is basically stupid - not just uneducated but really thick. Perhaps everything else in her life is a consequence of that. No one with any common sense would do or agree to the things she does after being betrayed by everyone she knows. Whether this stupidity is a result of genetics, environment of the frequent shots of Jägermeister is unclear. But she leaves home with a piece of homely advice from mom who seems to come to the same conclusion and is tired of having her around: “Isn’t that the American dream? Fuck over whoever is in your way and get what you want.”

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Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Azoy ir viln tsu vern a shreyber?
(So You Want To Be A Writer?)

It’s a bit like being a farmer (watch the analogies flow like rain here; or, better yet, like a never failing stream; much more biblical). You invest in your land and pick your crop. Then you work and re-work it until it’s ready to harvest. If you’re lucky, the rains hold off just long enough to get it undercover at the coop grain silo. After that, world affairs take over - if the harvest in Patagonia or Szechuan has been good (or some clown in the government pisses off some parallel foreign clown), selling prices drop through the floor, the mortgage goes unpaid, and you end up as a hired hand on someone’s else’s pig plantation or, worse, commuting to the city doing stuff you really hate.

For historical reasons (you know what they are), there aren’t a lot of Jewish farmers (or police detectives funny enough). But there are a not inconsiderable number of Jewish writers (maybe literature is the Jewish agriculture). Joshua Cohen, both the author of Book of Numbers and two of the book’s characters, is one such Jewish writer who knows the farmer’s angst. After finally getting into print with a notable publisher, his book launch gets gazumped by the 9/11 destruction. So no publicity, no reviews, and few sales. He ends up in a 20 foot by 20 foot unconverted loft under the BQE (downmarket even for a hometown Secaucus boy, not that New Yorkers would ever agree Jersey could be superior in anything, even slums), crafting (or maybe crofting) phoney travel brochures and right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. Gotta eat, no?

Not the end of the tsouris though (it never is). His mentor is killed in the grit-filled streets of lower Manhattan after the Towers collapsed; his agent, her wealthy brother, eventually drifts away from the literary sharecropper; and, oh yes, the missus kicks him out after Pesach Seder aggro, with the blessings of her mother. So he’s willing to take any bait that dangles itself into the watery depths of his misery (which are about as murky as the Gowanus Canal), specifically the biography of a tech mogul with the same name. The temptation to forgo his daily tuna on rye for some caviar blinis is irresistible. Of course there is no free lunch. But he can’t give up “that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot…” Tradition is not to be scoffed, particularly in non-traditional prose.

The three JC’s make a formidable ensemble (I know, I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, do try to keep up). Clocking who’s playing what and why can be taxing but after the first few hundred pages you get that it doesn’t matter. There is a choice to be made though. Do you revel in the wordplay (I’m thinking J. Joyce here); try to catch the obscure references to religion, culture, and the inner workings of quantum computers (and about who’s screwing who in techno land); take time to appreciate the very weird psychology of the JC’s and everyone they come in contact with (manic, egotistical, uncivilised); or just go with the flow of the story and its possible significance in one’s life (guidance counsellors, read this before sending kids into the maw of The Industry)? Doing all these simultaneously is just not possible with an IQ less than Bobby Fisher (another notable local boy). Doing them sequentially is probably a doctoral dissertation, and these tend to have less success than asparagus farms in Alberta.


Postscript: To my dismay I discovered that many other GR readers unfavourably compare Book of Numbers to Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. While the subject, technological culture, is the same in both, and the shared style of wordiness approaching logorrhoea is obvious, each is of an entirely distinct genre. It is here that my agricultural (or horticultural, if you prefer) analogy shows its usefulness.

Literary soil, as it were, with the kind of nutrient base of the two books ranges from that of high-acidity sarcasm, to a more neutral irony, and thence to a low ph (that is to say, high alkalinity) satire.

Sarcasm rages, mocks, and corrodes, even while it pretends to do the opposite. Satire celebrates, exaggerates, and builds extravagantly in order to accomplish the same end. Pynchon is acidly sarcastic; Cohen is satirically alkaline.

QED it is improper as well as futile to compare the two works. They are meant for different crops entirely. I hope this clears matters up in a neutral, that is to say, ironic fashion.

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Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How To Become Holy

Brian Dillon has done for the secular what scholars of the sacred call ‘exegesis,’ that is, the meticulous investigation of single sentences (biblical people call them verses; theology students refer to gobbets). Who wrote? Why was it written? How has what was written been interpreted by others? Are there other versions of what was written? How does what was written compare with other writing before and after? Etc.

Exegetes, in other words, squeeze their literary objects by making as many interpretations and connections that they can imagine until the objects yield a meaning, a moral, a truth that was lying hidden in plain sight. They are never satisfied with the obvious, the surface meaning. They search for allusions and subtle uses of style, vocabulary and grammatical nuance.

This is what Dillon does in his analysis of twenty-seven more or less random sentences that appealed to him aesthetically at some time in his reading history. He contemplates them as intently as a biblical scholar. He makes them say things that haven’t been said before.

Dillon’s use of exegesis has an interesting effect which I don’t think even he anticipated. It turns the secular texts he has chosen into sacred objects. Their importance lies not in what they say literally but in what they connect or point to beyond the words used. They become a kind of poetry simply by being treated as independent linguistic objects, hieroglyphs perhaps, whose significance must be discovered not casually presumed.

It strikes me that this very well could be how all sentences considered sacred got that way - for one reason or another (perhaps their inherent beauty) they attracted, no demanded, attention and consideration. If so, all sentences are potentially sacred. The ones already so designated are merely conventional. Perhaps this is a general conclusion of my cursory exegesis of Suppose A Sentence, and a reason for the book itself.

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The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire by Matt Taibbi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Off The Reservation For Good?

Taibbi dates it to 9/11 and America’s incredibly stupid responses, domestically and internationally, ever since. This is certainly the period when the American condition of functional insanity became unarguably visible. But the symptoms are not the cause of the disease. Something far more insidious is at play. Who knows, there may be something in the soil that infects Americans with a virulent inability to recognise that their principle enemy is themselves.

America was founded as a pure democracy. Not in the sense that it has ever lived up to its stated principles of justice and opportunity for everyone, but it had no real history or experience with any other form of governance. It never had a monarchy so lacked experience in dealing with the excesses of nobility. Although governed from abroad without real representation, the American colonies weren’t ruled by a dictatorship. So they never really understood the subtle mechanics of suppression and how they get institutionalised. Its laws inhibit theocracy, but it has no clear idea of the relation of religion to government. And despite the initial dominance of English culture, the diversity of class and economic background didn’t generate tribal camaraderie - except, of course, when confronted by the native inhabitants.

In short, the country has never had any established traditions to rely on other than its Constitutional document which in its naïveté it has turned into a biblical scripture to be interpreted in terms of ‘original intention.’ The country had to make up the rules as it went along. So, as it was recognised at its foundation, America is an experiment. It was, and likely still is a model of what democracy means despite its flaws. And when you’re the model, and you believe it, there isn’t even anywhere else to look for comparison… or help. When it starts to go wrong, therefore, no one knows quite what to do. There is no Plan B. To give the impression of competence the democratic government plays to the crowd… by invading the wrong countries, establishing senseless security measures at home, declaring war on an idea rather than an enemy, and sending its populace into a xenophobic frenzy.

Taibbi thinks that the rot started at the top. He thinks that this early 21st century fiasco caused the American people not only to lose faith in their government but also to turn to fundamentalist religion, conspiracists, and assorted other snake oil salesmen for solace and guidance. So in place of politics, America had culture wars. Its elected representatives in both parties became disassociated from their constituents and played their self-aggrandising games within the Beltway, oblivious to the national peril. The result is a grotesque parody of government. In everything but name, Taibbi predicts Trump a clear decade before his arrival on the scene.

But Taibbi, I think, overplays the phenomenon of governmental, particularly Congressional, incompetence as a relatively recent thing. As he also does the propensity of electoral candidates to pander, deceive, and betray their constituents. Does he expect his readers to believe that back room deals, payment for votes, and personal aggrandisement have ever not been an essential part of the American democratic system. Such behaviour has been de riguer since the founding of the republic. These are actions required to obtain and maintain power in the American democracy. They are not recent aberrations. They are not aberrations at all but the consequences de Tocqueville had recognised a century and a half before. America has never been short on political crooks; and most have been successful.

The difference now is the electorate finally smell the rot under the perfume of pious nationalism. And as Taibbi says, they’re leaving the reservation in increasing numbers. Not that they’ve done any better at discussing or solving their problems than their leaders. The policies of both Right and Left (except maybe Bernie Sanders) don’t address anything essential about the system. It’s easier to believe in the impending apocalypse or that Hillary is a sex trafficker or that Trump is sent from God than that democracy might work in a different way. And in that, perhaps, they’re right. It is possible democracy has exceeded its limits in the American experiment. What reform is even conceivable that might reduce the influence and financial power of political lobbyists, or create the means to publicise and prosecute the corruption that is carried out more or less publicly? What voluntary code might the parties adopt to ensure the transparency of nominations and sources of financial support?

Even more fundamentally, how would it be possible to successfully encourage an awareness of authentic self-interest among Americans. Taibbi thinks that they buy ideological messages like they buy washing powder. If the message is packaged attractively, and the reason for buying is received often enough, they’ll make a purchase. The fact that so many Americans look forward enthusiastically to the Second Coming is proof that they’ll buy anything. If the neighbour has it, they’ll want it - from hot tub to eternal salvation, a bargain is not to be missed. This is the land of myths and cults and survivalists and gun nuts… and as Taibbi documents so well, really entrenched stupidity. America is after all a highly conformist nation despite their self-image of pioneering independence. And as John dos Passos pointed out, "So many Americans feel that their neighbour has no right to know more than they do." Learning is consequently mightily restricted.

So many Americans have escaped already into a Neverland of political lunacy and they ain’t coming back any time soon. This makes the very rationale of democracy suspect. Dare anyone admit it?

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