The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Send-Up Too Far

OK I get it: Filipino history is complicated, as is the country itself which only shares this complicated history and not much else among its 7,640 islands, its diverse ethnicity, its approximately 180 languages (more than 20 are official in various regions), and a tradition of being governed from the Americas (first Mexico and then the United States). So any literate novel about the place is bound to be complicated if it claims authenticity.

The country’s greatest national hero is José Rizal, executed by the Spanish authorities in 1896 for his involvement in an attempted revolution. He actually was in Europe while its events were underway and had nothing to do with their planning. His crime? Publishing a novel, while in Europe, which his summary court martial felt initiated the sedition. Makes the Declaration of Independence look somewhat pedestrian, doesn’t it?

Raymundo Mata is Gina Apostol’s fictional protagonist (well, sort of). Mata’s purported memoir of 19th century Filipino life and his involvement with Rizal and the revolution is the bass line, as it were, of the book. At times the memoir is barely readable, sometimes written in indecipherable code, and continuously making reference to obscure events, concerns and people.

But the main story, the melody of the book, is not the memoir. Rather it is the cultural and academic controversy that envelops it. The provenance and authenticity of the memoir is a matter of debate put forward in polemical forewords and afterwords. And the text itself is buried in explanatory footnotes à la the worst doctoral dissertations. The book is densely satirical in other words.

But it is far too dense for me. The inside jokes and subtle references are beyond comprehension for anyone with only a passing knowledge of The Philippines. I suspect that even natives would have difficulty with much of it. Apostol’s parodies of academic cat fights are amusing but even they are a bit burlesqued for my taste. So while undoubtedly witty and scathingly self-referential, I don’t think it’s a piece of literature that travels well.

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Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism 
by 

Howard Schwartz

 

After The Great Voice Fell Silent

According to the book of Deuteronomy (5:22), YHWH spoke his last direct words to Israel in his Sinai epiphany. At the same time, and the only time, He wrote his words down in stone. As much as the contents, the form of this divine communication is critical. The written word would henceforth become a surrogate for the Great Voice that had fallen silent.

God’s silence and his endorsement of writing initiated a profound change in the religion of Israel. In a verbal culture of tale-tellers, amendments, additions, and variations in the stories being told are essentially invisible. Interpretation, although undoubtedly pervasive, can’t be noticed except by the interpreter. But with writing, the text remains more (but not entirely) stable and separate interpretations abound. This, of course, leads quickly to interpretations of interpretations, all of which may be compared, and some of which are incorporated back into the original text. YHWH Himself initiated a process which has continued without interruption.

In doing so, God put His Word definitively into human hands. What had gone before is a kind of hearsay pregnant with untold meanings waiting to be born. His are a people that not only tell stories, but also write them. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the Sinai revelation. God would speak through human beings, not just through the prophets but through every Jew. And He would speak primarily through the written word, the meaning of which would expand and adapt as necessary to meet new circumstances and experiences while the original is preserved. The Word acquires a history which can’t be separated from it.

Writing has an even greater effect on interpretation than the mere ability to compare alternatives. In the Torah each letter is recognised as having significance so that interpretation is intensified as the significance of ‘every jot and tittle’ is drawn out by rabbinic scholars. The spaces between letters become important in ways that the pauses between spoken words cannot. The spoken word certainly carries nuance, but the written word allows an infinite number of variations to be carried simultaneously. Thus the interpretive process is accelerated in the very process of writing. YHWH’s wisdom in sharing not just the content but the engine of continuous development of revelation with His people is vindicated by their subsequent dedication to adding to it generation upon generation.

So despite the ‘closure’ of Tanakh, the official Jewish scriptures, early in the Christian Era, the process of revelation has never stopped. The Septuagint, the various texts used to create the Masoretic compilation, the Mishnah, the Aramaic Targums, the Talmud, the Midrash literature, as well as other countless commentaries including the Haggadah and Kabbalah have since been produced. And so have the less scholarly myths that provide creative background to biblical characters and events or that attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions or divine inconsistencies in officially recognised texts. The Voice never ceases to flow.

Myth in this context is not a pejorative term. For the biblical scholar Clifford Geertz, “myth both provides a model of reality, what is really real, and a model for reality, how one is to behave in its light.” In his foreword, Elliot Ginsburg captures the spirit of Jewish myth: “God is, as the benediction has it, noten ha-torah, the one who ever gives Torah, each moment anew.” That is, the Torah, despite its fixedness as a text, never stops developing, adapting, and revealing. What it reveals is a way of interpreting the world. 

Myths are the most flexible and most widely understood form of communicating a reality that cannot be fully comprehended. They are sacred stories which contain archetypal characters and events. By being simultaneously profound and fanciful, myth presents comprehensible images that are instructive but not dogmatic, practical but not prosaic, spiritual without being ethereal. They ‘reframe’ without directing behaviour. Like the Torah itself, the interpretation of myth can never be exhausted.

Tree of Souls is an anthology that demonstrates the range and depth of Jewish interpretive imagination. As such it would be exhausting and probably fruitless to be read from beginning to end. Rather it is something to be consulted, to get lost in, to assimilate over an extended period. It could well be just the ticket for daily spiritual reading. Many of the stories are short vignettes that nonetheless invite extended meditative thought. And while these stories are Jewish, like all good myths they are almost always universal in their import and their aesthetic beauty. In short, they are relevant as a major component of the Western culture which they have helped to shape. We all share in the silence of the Great Voice, do we not?

 

The Power of Myth 
by 

Joseph Campbell, 

 

Bill Moyers

 

Stories Which We Share… or Don’t

Joseph Campbell spent most of his life promoting the positive, therapeutic, and restorative aspects of myth. His influence on culture and inter-cultural appreciation is tremendous. The effect of his writing on me over six decades is incalculable. But while Campbell was critical of those who would take myth and use it for harm - several totalitarian states are obvious targets - he was , I think, much more sanguine about the power of myth in his own country. This book, a series of interviews with a well-known American journalist, typifies the implicit ‘exceptionalism’ that Campbell seems to have applied to the United States and its founding myths. I think he missed some important, and not very encouraging, conclusions.

According to Campbell, myths have no inherent meaning. This is, of course, remarkable, for a man who has devoted his life to the spreading of mythical knowledge. But it is crucial to an understanding of why and how myths are significant in our lives.

Myths do not explain what life is about, its purpose, or the structure of the psyche. They are a record of the spiritual experience of our forebears. This experience is beyond what language is capable of expressing. So, as with any poetry, myths are meant to commemorate and sometimes evoke that experience.

Myths are not a guide to life in general. They are certainly not directives intended to describe a good life, or a moral life, or a successful life. They are stories which are on hand as we need them and in which we can identify our own experience and from which it is possible to glean suggestions for action (Carl Jung called them the Collective Unconscious, with a different but compatible function). Myths, in other words, are timely advice offered by those long dead to those who will eventually join them.

Ritual is myth acted out, essentially a play. While myths are shared stories, rituals are shared activities in which stories of birth, development, decline, and death are embedded. Together myth and ritual are the foundations of culture and establish what we casually call society and its institutions of marriage, government, the military, education, justice, art, even things as mundane as our currency.

All myths are spiritual in character. Some myths and their associated rituals become embedded in the institutions of religion. These tend to be treated as sacred stories, that is, not just as stories of experience but as truths in themselves which must be defended against change and given fixed meanings. Thus they become dogmatic and are directive rather than suggestive. And since dogmatic religion is notoriously fractious, it tends to fragment rather than unite the larger society.

Fundamentalism takes dogmatic myth one step further and claims that such myth is not only true but the only truth worth considering. Such fundamentalism often is, but need not be, religious. The secular culture of the United States, for example, is fundamentalist in insisting that its particular form of government is sacred and must be protected at all costs from variation in the interpretation of founding (fundamental) texts. So the political history of the country is one of conflicting dogmatisms. 

To say that America is a religious country seems to be confirmed by the commitment of a large proportion of its population to religious sects and denominations. Some see the decline in participation in religious ritual as indicating a decline in the influence of myth. On the contrary, the religion of America is America, that is what its citizens take as the America they want it to be. This secular religion is increasingly fundamentalist and has generated the growing factional stance of religious leaders and their congregations.

In short, America necessarily dogmatised its founding myths in order to create a country of law based on a written constitution. This is so to such an extreme degree that the only relationship among its various levels of government is through courts of law. Religion, overwhelmingly Christian, was an essential social glue uniting people across independent, widely separated, legal jurisdictions. But the overriding myth has been the American Way of Life with its virtues of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Religious congregations, churches, conferences and coalitions in America are political action groups within the secular religion.

That society does not function at all well when it is dependent upon the shared interpretation of a sacred text is historically fairly evident. No matter how congruent with human welfare the text itself, it can never cover the taken-for-grated norms of behaviour of everyday life, the shared traditions which lubricate the frictions of being together. The self-image of a melting pot has masked the reality of the anvil on which most immigrants were annealed into American society.

But these historical frictions seem insignificant in light of the current divergence of secular fundamentalisms in the country. The American Way of Life has become (arguably always was) a zero-sum game. The factional ideals are not just contrary but contradictory. Each faction has its interpretation of the sacred text which it attempts to enforce at the expense of opposing factions through the electoral process - and if necessary through the manipulation of this process. 

Technology has only made acutely clear what has always been the case - there never has been a shared myth in America, despite the one shared by the Deists who wrote the original sacred texts. These men believed that God and the Universe (which meant the same thing to many of them) shared their commitment to Reason. That most of the populace had no knowledge of this myth is likely. It is even more likely now. The attempt to create a shared myth was, according to Campbell’s logic was an intellectual conceit, a presumption on poetic metaphor, and bound to fail. Many other elites have made the same mistake.

That democratic liberalism has come to mean debate rather than violence for one faction, and armed response rather than verbal confrontation for another shows what happens when mythical poetry is considered more than it is. Powerful indeed, but not necessarily in a good way

 

Things I Don't Want to Know 

by 

Deborah Levy

 

Escaping Woman Traps

Trapped by hormones. Trapped by children and familial affections. Trapped by pervasive patriarchy. Trapped by social expectations and professional barriers. Trapped by the vagaries of the time, place and circumstances of birth. Trapped by legal injustice. Trapped by misogyny. Trapped (sometimes) by being Jewish. And trapped (if you’re English) by Brillo pads and West Finchley. It’s a jungle out there for every woman. 

Nature and nurture systematically conspire to make life miserable for half the world’s population. Awareness of the depths of this oppression only increases the intensity of the pain suffered. Writing is a form of therapy, not because it improves the situation or reduces the pain but because it’s an escape, and even sometimes an acceptable form of revenge against those who do bad things to other people, particularly to women.

If you’re good at writing, you can express rage at being trapped in a very controlled but deliberate way. And you know when rage can be transformed into humour or pathos. But you must, if you’re a woman, also know how to forget: “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.” Perhaps this is the only effective escape, to write calmly in order to forget.

 

A Horse Walks into a Bar 
by 

David Grossman, 

 

Jessica Cohen (Translation)

 

A Night At the Opera

Brilliant. David Grossman has created a new stand-up star with the acidic wit of Lenny Bruce and the pitiable cynicism of The Simpsons Krusty the Clown. I have seen performances by Jackie Mason and Rodney Dangerfield with dialogue that didn’t match Grossman’s Dov Greenstein. How many stage shows and clubs must Grossman have attended in order to understand the mysteries of technique, timing, and narrative line that are required to control an audience for hours? And on top of that, turn it into an engaging story? As I said: brilliant.

Here’s the thing ladies and gentlemen: Dov Greenstein doesn’t have a clue who Dov Greenstein is. Are you listening? You think he knows where this stuff comes from? There’s no script. Words just come out from nowhere. OK, maybe not nowhere, but from the past which is the same thing. The words are what the past has done to him and they want everyone to know it. But Dov can’t see what the words look like can he? Are you with me?

But here’s the thing, my trusted friends. Yes, that’s you too, you gorgeous ladies. It’s not just Dov’s past. Dov’s past is… what? Well, let’s say boring, tragic but boring - like Donald Trump or magnolia paint. Like anyone else’s past. Maybe his mother cares about it but not even his uncle Mo wants to know from Dov’s past. So forget about Dov’s past. It’s your past and my past he’s talking about, our memories of blessed memory. Crazy, right? But you’re so awesome. You get it. I know you get it. You’re so awesome.

So, bottom line, you’re not looking at Dov, you’re looking at you through Dov. I know, I know, can’t be true right? Dov knows bupkis about you. But trust me I’m a doctor. There’s a universe somewhere where this makes sense. Go ahead, laugh. But the man’s a psychic genius. Or do I mean psychotic? I’m telling you, this guy can act. And we all like looking into another man’s hell. Long story short: read about this schmekela . You’ll thank me. Are you listening Table #13? Yes, you, the lady with the concrete blue hair. Just checking, darling. I couldn't tell if you were asleep or, God forbid, dead under all that eye make-up. Good night all you wonderful people. You know I love you.

 

How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist 
by 

Andrew B. Newberg, 

 

Mark Robert Waldman

 

Nov 12, 2021

 ·

Don’t Think of the Colour Blue… No Really, Don’t 

OK, here’s the breakthrough experimental framework: the word ‘God,’ which has an indefinite meaning is hypothesised as having an integrative effect on the three different realities that, according to the researchers, all human beings have. Using advanced brain scanning technology they are able to say definitively that “If you contemplate God long enough, something surprising happens in the brain. Neural functioning begins to change.” They haven’t yet proven experimentally that these changes get the three realities to converge but someone somewhere is giving them lots of money to do so.

Unfortunately, the three realities that we all supposedly operate within (or generate, who knows?) are as indefinite as the word ‘God.’ The first is what is usually referred to as ‘objective reality,’ which is constituted by things without words that tend to distort and unreliably represent things. These things and events occurring among them are certainly ‘there’ but not as the words we use to describe them. So this reality is therefore mute and awaits interaction with us to speak… through us of course.

The second reality is subconscious and therefore also entirely wordless as well as mysterious - a sort of dark matter of the mind. We have to presume it’s there in order to make sense of other things - like the first reality which is also opaque (the phrase ‘blind leading the blind’ comes to mind). Essentially the subconscious consists of the neural algorithms that have proven useful for survival. Some of these are genetically programmed, others are learned as we develop. Since these neural algorithms are dependent upon experience in an historical set of circumstances, they may not always function to maintain life and limb in the future. In any case we only know of them by inference not observation.

The final reality is that of ‘consciousness.’ Of course this term is as indefinite as that of ‘God’ and ‘subconscious’ (some folk consider the two terms to be equivalent; this possibility has not been considered by the researchers however). In any case consciousness consists of lots of words, some of which we use to describe (or to map as the researchers prefer to say) the world we think we live in. Consciousness is a world that exists entirely within language. 

It is only in language that we can express our conscious beliefs, feelings, thoughts, concepts, and explanations about the other two realities, and all those things exist only in language. Because it puts words out willy-nilly, consciousness gets pretty cocky and thinks it rules the roost. This is the essence of delusion. As is typical, the researchers don’t want to apply their theory to themselves. So they get themselves in a tremendous muddle. It is only necessary to apply their own words to themselves to understand why.

According to the authors, consciousness (which is necessarily the location of their theory, according to their theory) “represents a reality that is the farthest removed from the world that actually exists outside of the brain.” And, they go on “we have yet to discover if, and to what degree, these two inner realities [of the subconscious and the conscious] communicate with each other.” But they do know that there is only the most tenuous connection between where the two internal maps are located, the brain, and what happens in the world: 

“… the human brain seems to have difficulty separating fantasies from facts. It sees things that are not there, and it sometimes doesn't see things that are there. In fact, the brain doesn't even try to create a fully detailed map of the external world. Instead, it selects a handful of cues, then fills in the rest with conjecture, fantasy, and belief.”

I have no problem with this psychological framework per se. If somewhat culture-specific and epistemologically as well as ontologically puerile, it is nevertheless standard Freudian stuff which these guys have imported to interpret their brain scans. Not that they can see the conscious or subconscious parts of the brain. All the can see are the scan results.

The experimental design is simple and has nothing to do with what actually happens in Reality #3 aside from researchers talking to subjects and interpreting brain scans. Signals in the form of words, phrases, and instructions are passed from the researchers to the subjects of the study. Changes in neural activity are then recorded. These are then correlated with verbal reports from the subjects to the researchers about their ‘state of mind.’ The conclusions reached by the researchers are that when the word ‘God’ or other rather imprecisely described ‘godly thoughts’ are involved in a researcher/subject interaction, specific neural pathways are created which are correlated with subjective reports of well-being.

It should be obvious that this is systematic research not into the psychology of religion but of applied linguistics. The researchers have no idea what interaction between the conscious and unconscious brain might be (or if indeed such a distinction has any foundation except in consciousness itself). Nor do they know anything about the consequent behaviour of the God-oriented subjects versus the rest of the population. Are there fewer criminals? More beneficent millionaires. Lower divorce rates? Fewer (or more) suicides? Etc. Apparently no one has sought to inquire.

And, more to the point, no one knows whether words other than ‘God’ can be contemplated with equivalent reported changes in goals, attitudes, or feelings of well being. The claim is that “the moment God is introduced to the human brain, the neurological concept will not go away.” And what about the colour ‘blue’ or the relationship ‘mother?’ Or for that matter E = mc2? Neither the researchers nor the subjects know what the other means by ‘God,’ that is, how God is connected to other words and what unconscious algorithms might be involved in determining that meaning.

I have no doubt that reflective thinking, whatever form that might take from Zen meditation (technically non-thinking) to a quiet moment in the park (where thinking is allowed to go rampant). It might even make you a better person. But these guys have a thing about Compassionate Communication which actually has nothing to do with God or their Freudian theory of reality. Their thesis is that civility and respect given to people often provokes them to respond in a similar manner. And even further, when that response happens, it tends to generate feelings of well-being!

I want to know where these guys get their funding. As an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania where they do their research, I think I already have a leg up. I have an idea for which I want first round venture-finance, see? It’s a thing, the components of which are all equidistant from any arbitrary point by any arbitrary distance. I’ve already demonstrated its usefulness in moving heavy loads from point A to pint B. I’m keeping it general for the moment because I don’t want the practical consequences to leak. I have a prototype in my garage. Serious investors are welcome to inspect upon appointment.


Postscript: I think it would be useful to reference another rather less stupid book on neurological research in order to demonstrate the point that at any point in time most scientific results are just junk: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

 

Cat's Cradle 
by 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

Health Warning: Truths Kill Better Than Cigarettes

I have a theory that only adolescents and geriatrics can appreciate Vonnegut. The first because he confirms what they fear and despise about the adult world they’re about to enter; the latter because they equally have learned to fear and despise the world they’ve left behind. Those between the extremes literally cannot afford to take Vonnegut seriously. The cost of doing so would be severe depression or social (or bodily) suicide. But for those who engage in therapeutic despair, Vonnegut is strangely comforting, a Christ-like figure who takes on the world’s absurdity so that the rest of us don’t have to.

Like it or not we live as a matter of faith. St. Paul had it right after all about that. Except he had the object of faith wrong. It’s not Jesus, who had as little clue as the rest of us about what was going on. No, his faith and ours is in the God behind it all, the deus absconditus, the divine puller of strings who is executing a clever plan that he hasn’t let us in on. The only important doctrine of this faith is that anyone who thinks he knows the plan is a knucklehead. For a religion, this is about as simple as it gets.

So the only thing to do when you have faith is to keep on truckin’. ‘It is what it is,’ as they say. Head down, pencil scribbling, keyboard clacking, socket-wrench turning, as the case may be. Thinking about the end-result - a solid bolt, an airworthy plane, a hydrogen bomb, millions dead and dying - will drive you mad. Making a living is what it’s about. Getting ahead, getting a name in the business, being top dog. Even if you don’t make it, you tried your best, you kept the faith.

Best thing is to pull your head in like a turtle and lay low about things not relevant to getting ahead. That’s part of the faith really and saves immensely on headache medication. And so is science, part of the faith that is. Scientists are the most faithful, something like priests really, and they generally keep low, really low, except when something big happens like a new model Chevrolet or an atom bomb. Then they come out of their shells and bask, hoping someone will throw a prize or a promotion their way. Afterwards they pull their necks back in and disappear.

Scientists value life. That doesn’t mean they care too much about living people or other biological forms. They just find life mysterious and like to study it. Don’t get me wrong. Some scientists have wives and friends and children whom they might care about but the lives of hundreds or thousands or millions of people are just statistics. So if your wife dies in a road traffic accident it’s a tragedy, but if a whole city vanishes under a mushroom cloud that’s a sign of progress… scientifically speaking. Sometimes the truth hurts. It’s called being objective and is the most important virtue of the scientist. Essentially it means they aren’t allowed to cry at work.

So all you scientists out there, young and old, just keep on doing what you’re paid to do. Truth is too precious to lose. And new patents don’t register themselves, do they? Corporate teamwork is what it’s all about. Remember that corporate loyalty is how you show your faith most clearly. Nihilism is out. Without faith, where would we be? In the crapper, that’s where we’d be. And by the way, whatever you’ve heard about this stuff called ice-nine that can freeze all the water in the world, it’s a lie. And anyhow, it’s top secret.

Postscript: my daughter-in-law happened to post me this today. https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/h... Kurt, where are we when we need you most?

 

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity 
by 

David Graeber, 

 

David Wengrow

 

Rekindling Historical Imagination

David Graeber and David Wengrow are super-heroes in the scholarship of human development, the equivalent, perhaps, of a Howard Zinn for world history. In The Dawn of Everything they expose the culturally biased pseudo-histories of the likes of Fukuyama, Diamond, and Pinker, not to mention the influential fictions of Hobbes and Rousseau on which they are based. These and many others are little more than literate rumour-mongers, closet racists, and tellers of tedious time-worn tales lacking evidence or logic. That David Graeber died almost immediately upon completion of this original and provocative work is a tragedy. There are so many more idols that need toppling; so many better historical questions to ask.

Here are just several highlights of the meticulously documented conclusions in The Dawn of Everything:

1. The 18th century European Enlightenment was in large part sparked by exposure to the indigenous tribes of the forests of Northeast North America.

2. The so-called European ‘cultural efflorescence ‘ of Homo Sapiens about 40,000 years ago is mythical and was in any case likely preceded by real events of equal significance in Africa that have little to do with an economic shift from hunting to farming.

3. So-called primitive peoples existing today on the fringes of modern states are not ‘windows to the past’ but sophisticated cosmopolitan societies which demonstrate imaginative solutions to perennial problems of human political organisation.

4. Our modern problems of economic, sexual, and political inequity arise not because of anything inherent in human nature but at the historical moment when personal wealth can be transformed into political power and coercive authority.

5. The formal freedoms provided in modern democracies are far more restrictive (and restricted) than the substantive freedoms afforded widely in pre-industrial, non-European societies.

6. Montesquieu’s The System of Laws (1748), a book highly influential in the constitutional deliberations of the Founders of the United States, was very likely the product of contact with the Osage people of the Great Plains.

7. Our traditions of social dominance and coercive authority are derived from Roman Law which conceived of the male head of the family as literally owning the lives of everyone in the household.

The list of interesting propositions contained in The Dawn of Everything could be easily trebled. They are purposely provocative, sometimes counter-intuitive, but always framed by outstanding scholarship. Above all, they are interesting. By challenging conventional wisdom, they demand consideration and attention to the logic behind the historical facts as conventionally reported.

So The Dawn of Everything is really not so much a human history as it is an historiographical critique of the sources, methods, presumptions, prejudices, and criteria of historical validity employed by the humans who have written human history. History is a political activity. And so are the anthropological and sociological studies upon which much of history has been based. This is the point. Whether or not any of the propositions presented by Graeber and Wengrow are ultimately verified is of secondary importance. They are serious hypotheses which have been crushed by lack of imagination.

The tales of human development we tell ourselves are riddled with the politics of the day and form the context of the politics of the future. Every once in a while someone comes along to shake the intellectual cages in which we have trapped ourselves to reveal just how much we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, misled, or deluded. We are beyond fortunate to have Graeber and Wengrow do that for today’s world. They will undoubtedly be castigated and derided but they cannot be ignored.

 

Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Present 
by 

Harold Bloom

 

Between Truth and Meaning

To call Harold Bloom’s aesthetic theory complex is a fatuous understatement (he probably would call it a litotes). Whatever might be said about it is probably wrong. Therefore I feel emboldened to give my errant opinion with minimal embarrassment. Here goes:

One plus one equals two: a truth without meaning. Marriage is an eternal union of a man and a woman: a proposition with meaning whose truth is intrinsically uncertain and ultimately irrelevant. This distinction truth/meaning is important. Hannah Arendt made it the central concept of her The Life of the Mind in 1971 but I don’t know if she was influenced by Bloom or vice versa. 

There are criteria for determining truth found in logic, science, and what is generally called common sense. But naked truth has no necessarily reactive effect on the mind. Meaning is more or less immune to truth. The blatant lies of Trump have positive meaning for his followers who know they are lies; and are equally meaningful for his opponents who recognise the man’s mendacity.

According to Bloom, between these two realms of truth and meaning there is another distinct literary axis which ultimately determines the constitution of truth and the direction of meaning. This is the domain of poetry and belief. These are opposing aesthetic categories that are employed in various combinations to support/generate/justify both truth and meaning.

Belief has confidence in language, a presumption that it can be ‘held’ and ‘fixed’ consciously by a mind (as in religious doctrine), and that it endures by a concerted, even stubborn, act of will. Poetry actively resists the tenets of belief. Its explicit intention is the undermining of linguistic certainty by breaking the conventions of language from vocabulary to grammar. Poetry may be memorised but it is never ‘held’ in any certain way. Rather poetry generates more poetry, largely through its influence on the unconscious mind. 

Both belief and poetry dominate our intellectual lives no matter what the subject. So, for example the criteria of scientific truth are clearly unscientific as confirmed by their evolution over time and their differences among scientific disciplines. Ultimately the criterion employed in any discipline depends upon both a rather poetic feel of rightness, and the beliefs of scientists about the fundamental purpose of their work. In other words what constitutes meaningful truth.

Similarly, the work of writers of fiction, although hardly conforming to a novelistic template, for example, do adhere to some sort of structure in narrative development in order to convey some degree of facticity (to use Bloom’s term for context). Yet what they write is largely judged upon their ability to innovate the mundane, prosaic, static character of life, language, and the merely obvious into something original, perhaps even strange. Thus producing meaningful truth.

It is in terms of poetics and beliefs, therefore, that Bloom conducts his criticism. Both categories are in some sense divine, that is, their source lies outside of what we can determine or control as human beings. They arrive, as it were, from elsewhere. Whether they are God-given or a product of the Collective Unconscious is irrelevant. They come to us, usually embedded in a culture so that they appear as ‘already there,’ that is, as effectively eternal.

For Bloom our inheritance of poetics and beliefs is a challenge as well as a blessing. If we take them seriously, we are bound to fight them, to strive beyond blind acceptance to further interpretations and combinations that express ourselves. In a sense we honour tradition by overcoming it, by creating a new tradition in which the old is visible but only as the old. We have a drive to transcend and replace but not to destroy.

Such transcendence of culture, even merely linguistic culture, is no easy task. Success requires a profound understanding of our existing culture. This implies an exceptional talent and experience with symbolic manipulation - with language, music, material art, narrative themes and development, etc. But success also demands an ability to withstand what Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence,’ the fear and distress involved in presuming to attempt to surpass one’s forebears.

Bloom’s aesthetic theory is remarkable in many ways. For example, he has ‘tested’ it repeatedly in individual cases in every era and with every genre from Ancient Greek philosophy to modern graphic novels. But what I find most remarkable is his application of his concept to literally all of Western literature as he does in this volume. Whether one agrees with Bloom or not, his insights about the sources and subsequent trajectory of Western literature are as unforgettable as they are bold - perhaps because these characteristics imply one another.

In the aesthetic playground of the poetic and the believed it is sometimes difficult to tell which is the actor and which is the acted upon. Even more disconcerting, they sometimes imitate or even become the other as they seek to create new truths and new meanings. Therefore any definitive statement about their respective roles is suspect because the two act in conjunction.

Nevertheless it is possible to at least conceptually isolate the two in a kind of literary differential calculus in which other things are held equal for the purpose of analysis. So Bloom identifies two primary sources for our literary culture. 

The first is the so-called Jahwist of the Hebrew Bible, the unknown interpolator to the Torah (the first five books). It is the Jahwist who is responsible for the second creation story in Genesis in which Adam is created from red clay and the breath of God (a poetic joke amidst an aesthetic dominated by belief: Adam is the name, adamah is what he’s made from). Bloom calls the Jahwist eccentric because his speciality is irony, a sort of pained belief which permeates the rest of the Bible and erupts periodically, perhaps most explicitly in the books of the prophet Jeremiah, Job, and Qoholeth (Ecclesiastes).*

The second source of Western literature is poetic, that of the equally unknown contributor to the Greek myths of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer. Like the Bible, these myths were transmitted orally for some extended but indeterminate period before they were written. They are also the product of a process of redaction, addition, and transcendence similar to that of the Bible. While it is a work of historical fiction, it also communicates an enormous amount of what can be called the belief system of the ancient Greeks - among others, their psychology, conception of the body, human purpose, and virtue, all very different from that of the Bible. But there is a peculiar congruence between the Bible and the Iliad: irony. The irony of the Jahwist is matched by that of Homer in the latter’s portrayal of the fate of his heroes and their gods.

These two works, according to Bloom, establish the tradition of Western literature. At its best this literature shares in their ironic character regardless of how any particular work plays with poetry and belief. For Bloom, literary playfulness as well as artistry, that is to say originality, reaches its English apotheosis in Shakespeare, whose masterful irony is simply unmatched by any other writer. He thus almost miraculously is able to create meaningful truths like no other. 

I don’t think it is, therefore, too much to conclude that Bloom’s critical aesthetic criterion is essentially creative irony, which through its very innovation is subtle and startling in equal measure. He takes his title from Marvel’s remark about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Marvell feared that Milton would taint established Christian conventions in his poem. When Milton’s work was finished, he was glad to see that Milton had not contradicted church doctrine. What he failed to notice however was that Milton had transformed the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible into himself. An irony tough to top.

I share Bloom’s view of irony, whether because I have assimilated it progressively from reading Bloom or because he confirms something I have felt from childhood. At a fairly early age I made an explicit decision to devote myself to a life of the mind, that is to say, language. But as I matured it became clear that I had entered a sort of contract with the devil that made me vulnerable to scientific rationality on the one hand and the literalism of the humanities on the other. What I experienced in the enclosure of poetry and belief was not normal, or at least not all that common among people I knew.

I suspect that Bloom perceived the same irony as I, namely that the playground of poetry and belief ultimately had only the most tenuous connection with what most folk think of as the realities of truth and meaning in the working world, and it provides no defences for itself. It is simply not possible to construct a theory that reliably connects language with what is not language. Engaging in the attempt is useless. Or said a rather different way: language is the ultimate irony, a blessing and a curse from which we cannot escape. Apparently this is frightening to many.

* In light of this it is easy to understand Jesus as the ultimate irony extending from the mind of the Jahwist: the crucified king, the suffering God, the beloved but abandoned son etc.

 

Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages 
by 

Jaroslav Pelikan

 

Not Spake But Speaketh

Most Christians are biblically illiterate fools. Either captivated by the confident cadence of some self-aggrandising televangelist or desperate for acceptance within a comforting community of believers, they smugly think that they are being let in on the secrets of eternal life, or a prosperous life, or a life of better relationships, or that most sought after of all lives, a happy one. That the scriptural snake-oil they are being peddled has been poisoned just doesn’t occur to them.

Then there are a few Christians like Jaroslav Pelikan who emerge from the American evangelical heartland and dedicate themselves to understanding what the collection of myths, rumours, commands, and history called the Bible really has to say and how what it says has become a static, often oppressive, religious doctrine. For him, as for me, it is a book that doesn’t provide answers but provokes questions. Frankly I am mystified that someone like Pelikan maintains his beliefs while knowing what he knows about what fellow-Christians have done to and with their sacred documents. Nevertheless what he knows is worth sharing as widely as possible.

Whose Bible Is It? isn’t written primarily for Christians, but for Jews, and for that relatively small band of Christians who recognise that they are also Jews in everything but name. It is consequently an excellent introduction to profound biblical scholarship. Pelikan was a believer who understood the inevitably cultural matrix of his beliefs. He makes it clear that this culture is both inescapable and even more valuable than any particular beliefs it holds at any moment. For Pelikan, religion is clearly about a search rather than about a destination. Sharing in that search is an eye-opening joy.

For example, there is a wide-spread conceit among Christians (Mormons excepted) that divine revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. Such a claim is obviously arbitrary and fatuous. Pelikan rejects it while quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, thus linking biblical with American culture: 

For “not spake but speaketh” aptly describes the ongoing revelation of the word of God that has come over and over again and that still continues to come now, not in some kind of high-flying independence from but, to the contrary, in a devout and persevering engagement with the pages of the Sacred Book.”

In other words, Pelikan considers the Bible as inspirational rather than definitive. In this view its very ambiguity, imprecisions , and even contradictions become not matters of scorn but objects of interpretation. And of interpretation there is no end, which is perhaps the Bible’s greatest Emersonian feature (and not shared with the Book of Mormon). Both Jewish and Christian scriptures are inherently fluid. They float on a substrate of barely perceptible but mobile ‘truths,’ that poke through from time to time. Like water on a moving lava bed perhaps, the surface boils away momentarily to reveal something previously invisible. When this happens, it’s always a surprise; so one has to be prepared.

A good example is Pelikan’s exegesis of perhaps one of the most cosmic and well-known verses in the Christian Bible, the opening to John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word” (Logos in the Greek of John). Clearly meant to mirror the opening of the Book of Genesis in which YHWH speaks the universe into existence, John’s gospel nevertheless often appears overtly anti-Semitic and has been used to justify the hatred of Jews throughout the Christian epoch. But Pelikan sheds some very needed light on the translation out of Greek: 

In addition to Word or Reason or Mind, ho Logos in John can mean Wisdom (Sophia), and this is what Sophia says about herself in the Septuagint version of the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs: “The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works. He established me before time was in the beginning before he made the earth. When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him. I was by him, suiting myself to him, I was that in which he took delight; and daily I rejoiced in his presence continually.”

So the presumption that ‘the Word’ refers to Jesus as co-eternal with God is at least questionable. And the alternative translation is not only plausible but sets an entirely different cultural tone to everything that follows. Suddenly the gospel becomes Jewish and implies what is much more likely than has been traditional, namely Jews talking to Jews and criticising each other.

Another example is in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Hebrews in which the Jewish Scriptures are quoted from the Psalms: “And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.” If this sounds somewhat inscrutable (like much of the Bible), one shouldn’t fret. It is the result of bad translation which after becoming official has embedded itself in the world as ‘biblical truth.’ Pelikan explains how: 

Because the Greek word for a “messenger” of any kind was angelos and the word for “wind” could also mean “spirit,” the sentence in the Psalms “He makes the winds His messengers” comes out in the Greek translation as “He makes His angels spirits.” It is quoted that way in the New Testament as part of a discussion of the angels, as well as in Christian liturgies to this day, even though that is not what the Hebrew original is saying.

Pelikan provides dozens of similar examples that would make any fundamentalist scream with a rage of unrequited expectations. But his general point is that an intelligent understanding of biblical material is simply not possible through listening to some crackpot preacher in a revival tent or on national television, or for that matter in almost any pulpit around the world. Christians are by and large simply unequipped for the task of spreading the word they consider sacred: 

…knowledge of the Hebrew original virtually disappeared from the church for a thousand years or more… even the earliest Latin translations of the books of the Tanakh [the Jewish Bible] (which we have now only in fragments) were based on it, being therefore translations-of-a-translation, in which the human mistakes or idiosyncracies of the seventy (or whoever they were) were compounded rather than corrected, as the words of the Bible made their tortuous way across the several major linguistic boundaries from Hebrew to Greek to Latin.

Just determining what constitutes the Word at all is a monumental task which is really never finished. Its meaning changes continuously every time it is spoken. It can therefore never be used to command, or judge, or justify but only to inspire. Inspire toward what end? Pelikan is not hesitant to say with the prophet Micah: 

He has told you, O man, what is good, And what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice And to love goodness, And to walk modestly with your God. That “only” has rightly been called “the biggest little word in the Bible.”

Jesus said the same, as did his near contemporary Rabbi Akiva, and as did Marcus Aurelius, and after him Augustine. Really what else is there to say of any import? On the other hand, is there any limit to the number of interpretations possible, and required, for even this brief passage in daily life? Revelation occurs in these interpretations, or not at all.

 

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities 
by 

Jean Améry, 

 

Sidney Rosenfeld (Translator), 

 

Stella P. Rosenfeld (Translator)

 

When Contradiction Reigns

As Jean Améry says in the discussion of his own torture by the SS, it is not possible to communicate one’s pain accurately without becoming an inflictor of pain. Only by becoming the torturer’s victim can one comprehend the pain of another victim. Thus he establishes both the inadequacy of language and the essential isolation of that which we call the mind, which can be penetrated by words but not by the real experience of others. There is a truth to Cartesian solipsism that is confirmed only by the human body in extreme distress.

But words can penetrate to the mind, which is constituted by words. Or perhaps more accurately, the mind demands one’s experiences have some kind of explanation. It is this demand that exceeds the mind’s limits so that Améry doesn’t hope to achieve it. Even in his preface to the second edition (in 1976, 30 years after the events described), he admits to being unable to make sense of his experiences:

“I did not strive for an explicative account at that time, thirteen years ago, and in the same way now too, I can do no more than give testimony… I had no clarity when I was writing this little book, I do not have it today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would also amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history. My book is meant to aid in preventing precisely this. For nothing is resolved, no conflict is settled, no remembering has become a mere memory. What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.”

Others, Améry recounts, did have an explanation. Christians could cite the apocalypse and subsequent redemption. Communists might revel in the destructive evidence of late stage capitalism. Fervent Jews saw the hand of a protecting God even in their abject misery. But there was no explanatory comfort available in Plato, Kant, or Hegel, much less the Nazi-intellectual Heidegger. Even the cultural heritage of Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche had been usurped by the torturers. For the person of intellect not centred around a religious or political belief there was nothing. “In the camp the intellect in its totality declared itself to be incompetent.”

And yet Améry finds a reason for the lack of explanation, which is in a sense an explanation. The fundamental, mind-numbing contradiction of not just the camp but of all of National Socialism was expressible: “… the state did not order him to die, but to survive. The final duty of the prisoner, however, was death.” The prisoner was committed to dying, for as long and as painfully as economically feasible. The misery of dying destroyed all thought, metaphysics most particularly, and with that the thought of death itself was obliterated. The prisoner feared not death but the possibility of dying in an even more wretched way. “Dying was omnipresent, death vanished from sight.”

The camps, therefore, were a microcosm of National Socialist society. This was a society intent on destroying itself as its only objective. This society tortured itself because it was not just led by but also composed of torturers. “Torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence.” Its only legacy is the victim:

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected… Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.”

I find it impossible not to compare this nihilism with the politics of the Right demonstrated today in many places throughout the world, especially in America. It is clear that as I write Republicans have adopted a strategy of national destruction. Anything that inhibits or threatens their power - lost elections, black people, immigration, vaccination, intellectual argument, law itself - are deemed fraudulent, immoral, anti-American, and are resisted with violence as required. But it is also clear that achievement of power will destroy their own destructive achievement. They have no other objective and they take pride in that. Améry provides the only sort of explanation that makes sense to me.

 

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe 
by 

Lee Smolin

 

Reviving the Old Traditions

Time Reborn is an erudite, intense, but nonetheless respectful polemic about the fundamental structure of the universe. Its claim, if I understand it correctly, is simple: the first ‘substance’ of the cosmos is not space, energy, or matter but time. Time is not another dimension of space, or an illusion of material consciousness; it is a reality that generates all else that we experience, and indeed beyond that to everything that happens.

I am not qualified to judge whether what Smolin has to say concerns physics or metaphysics, that is whether his view is a scientific hypothesis subject to experimental verification or a existential presumption which is self-verifying once adopted. But what I can note with some confidence is that it is an idea with a long pedigree even though it has been presented historically in very different terms. 

In Orphic myth, for example, the progenitor of all the other gods is Chronos, the god of time (not to be confused with Cronos, a mere Titan). Chronos with his daughter Ananke (don’t ask!) split the Primordial Egg from which emerge the other gods and the rest of the cosmos. 

Several hundred years later, Plato in the Timaeus would define time as “the moving image of the eternal according to number.”* What he meant by that is certainly debatable but one coherent explanation is that everything else in the creation of The Craftsman (God) is placed within time in order for these things to exist at all. Even for Plato, therefore, time drives existence itself (or is the cradle of existence if one prefers) in a manner not dissimilar to the Chronos myth.

In the biblical Book of Genesis, the first (or Priestly) story of creation was largely composed in the same era as the Orphic myth. In this story, the first creation is Light which is immediately separated from the Darkness, thus generating day and night. These are created before the Sun and the stars. Thus the first day’s divine work is the creation of time, confirming the Greek idea of time as the primordial substance of the universe. 

Remarkably, Lee Smolin believes that both the pre-Socratics and the ancient Hebrews had it right: “Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature.” From time everything else flows. The implications of this proposition are astounding, and not just for physics.

Among other things, the hypothesis of primordial time means that every so-called truth - scientific, social, logical, theological, physical, spiritual - has a sell-by date attached. There are no eternal truths (presumably even that one is subject to evolution at time’s discretion). If Time Is King then we will never understand it fully because we are contained within it just as the Greeks suspected. And wasn’t even YHWH surprised when his creation didn’t work out as intended (not once but three times), suggesting an established (although possibly unconscious) recognition of divine subservience to time?

Perhaps the potential dominance of time is the real reason behind the religious objections to Darwinian evolution, which Smolin refers to as “the prototype of thinking in time.” What’s offensive to the the evangelicals is perhaps not so much the idea that not all species were created at once, but that God himself evolved, a possibility that Scripture clearly confirms within both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian addendum, as well as in the transition between the two. If Darwin is perceived as a impending spiritual threat by these people, Smolin represents the apocalypse which already has happened. 

Smolin is concerned that we don’t take his hypothesis to imply relativism. I don’t understand why. He clearly states that everything about reality is relative to time with no exceptions. The exception he wants to make is actually no exception at all. When he says that… 

“Truth can be both time-bound and objective when it’s about objects that exist once they’ve been invented, either by evolution or human thought.”

… isn’t it clear that what he is referring to are only linguistic expressions of a certain type, namely definitions? The principles of mathematics are indeed objective, eternal, and absolute, but only because they are defined the way they are. Such definitions include not only the number 5, for example, but also the species Homo Sapiens and all other linguistic categories. Words are unavoidably defined only by other words. And even these will be periodically re-defined to suit evolving human purposes.

With these views, Smolin echoes those of the great American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (whom he cites). Peirce was the first to propose that the apparent unpredictability of events is not due to insufficient data or observational error but is an inherent feature of the universe. He called it “tychism,” to designate a permanent randomness in cosmic behaviour. Smolin is, therefore, channeling Peirce when he says, “Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world.” 

Peirce also provides the logical justification for Smolin’s proffer of hypotheses in a world with changing natural laws. How is it possible to rationally construct guesses about the way the world works if the way the world works is changing? Peirce formulated his principle of “synechism,” a normative (not existential) presumption that there may be some ultimate knowledge toward which scientific inquiry is striving as a continuous method for dealing with discontinuity.

One of the central presumptions of modern science is that the universe wants itself, or at least allows itself, to be known through specialised and expert human inquiry. In Smolin’s way of thinking, this becomes merely a human conceit. The universe is ultimately inscrutable, which should be obvious since, being part of it, we can never observe it in its totality. 

This implies that every scientific theory and explanation we create is not simply temporary and corrigible but ultimately fictional. They are stories we tell, probably to make us feel more secure in a world that we know will finally consume us. That some of these stories work better than others shouldn’t distract us from their fundamental character. None have a happy ending.

It may be that the Greek Heraclitus had the enduring key to all inquiry when he suggested not just that “Nature loves to hide,” (as Smolin notes) but also that “Nothing endures except change.” (which he does not). We cannot step into the same stream twice after all.

So to search for stable knowledge in the obscure details of subatomic particles or arcane string theory may not be the most rational strategy of inquiry. Perhaps the most important discoveries are waiting in plain sight and experienced by everyone. Intellectual humility might be the only essential virtue of not just the scientist but the authentic human being, that is, one who doesn’t readily believe his own press.

Perhaps Smolin should keep in mind that Chronos was intentionally confounded in Greek myth with his progeny of decidedly different character, Cronos. Whatever concept of time is eventually agreed by scientists, it too will be as unstable as Chronos according to Smolin’s theory.

* A little clarification is helpful with this definition. For Plato, as for Thomas Aquinas centuries in the future, eternity is not an infinite series of moments but a entirely timeless category. What Plato seems to be saying is that in every moment we have a glimpse of the eternity in which God exists but with an entirely different mode of existence than that which exists in time. It is time, therefore, which allows and simultaneously restricts existence for created beings. It is the metaphysical ocean in which we swim and that provides us existential nourishment. Any prospective entry into the eternal requires an ontological transformation, an extraction from the cradle of time. Creatures are not capable of this on their own, indeed if at all. This seems to me an alternative way of making Smolin’s point that we are not intellectually permitted to think of ourselves outside of time. This is equivalent to presuming either that we do not exist or that we are divine. Also, keep in mind that for Plato numbers are eternal forms. When he says “according to number” he is not assigning numbers to moments but moments to the eternal scale of numbers. The “image” he refers to is one of these eternal forms, numbers. Thus time is not a measure of change. It’s not a measure of anything at all. It is something sui generis, that is, entirely of its own sort. This too is implied by Smolin. Perhaps it might be productive to think of time as a primal force through which change occurs. Just a speculation.

 

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Protecting Ourselves With Words

Those old enough will remember the confident chants at the Woodstock Festival in 1969: “No rain. No rain.” ( it rained buckets). Or many younger folk might have had the experience of being tucked in bed while saying their prayers at their parents’ direction: “… and God bless Mummy and Daddy and please help cure Grandma’s liver cancer.” (She died the next week). And we all know about the standard line by the hero in Westerns and B-movie Adventures: “Don’t worry Ma’am, it’ll be all right, I promise.” (of course it never is).

There is a deep impulse to believe that our words can change the world. Hence our fascination with incantations, magical spells, arcane knowledge, religious ritual, and obdurate idealism. Of course words don’t change the world. But they sure do change the users of words. We pretend to have some control over the world by speaking about it with confidence and decisiveness. Actually we’re whistling in the dark. It’s an evolutionary compensation I suppose. Consciousness of our own mortality and its constant fear would be detrimental to our survival. So we have words to protect us. We explain things. We rationalise our fragile and insignificant existence as something of cosmic and eternal importance.

Words allow us to rationalise, to normalise, absolutely any set of circumstances if we think it’s in our interests to do so. We call this morality, when all that term means is that we have found the words to make us feel safer, more secure, less bestial, in short, that we are able to live with each other without constant fear. Words allow this. Our actions may be abysmally horrid, intensely, anti-social, entirely self-serving even self-destructive, but we’re comfortable with that as long as the words justify, or at least don’t forbid, what we do.

Tender Is the Flesh takes our rationalising talent very seriously. I feel confident to say that it goes beyond the bounds of any other literary or cinematic experience any of us has ever had. The book makes Orwell’s 1982 look like a fairy story. The infamous film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre doesn’t touch it for horror. Soylent Green becomes a euphemistic appetiser. Documentaries of the Holocaust come closest I suppose, but even they don’t depict the systematic breeding of victims, their mutilation to prevent self-abortion, the casual mass slaughter, butchering, distribution, and sale of the resulting cuts of meat to the social elite.

Yes, the book is about industrialised cannibalism. It is meant to shock. It clearly intends to show how we use language to do whatever we think necessary to live comfortably. Victims are not human; they are product. Their hands are front trotters; ears and fingers are mixed brochettes; and there’s tongue à la vinaigrette as a delicacy. The most expensive cuts deserve time and care in preparation: “It’s the most tender kind of meat, there’s only just a little, because a kid doesn’t weigh as much as a calf… It melts in your mouth.”

This is a world created by words. Or rather it is a world in which words have progressively transformed the people who use them. Words have allowed them to enter a new reality and “to reaffirm this reality through words, as though words created and maintain the world in which they live.” It is true that “words construct a small, controlled world that’s full of cracks. A world that could fracture with one inappropriate word.” So certain words referring to victims as human, for example, are punished severely. But some still remember when the words meant something different. Marcos, the protagonist, is one such, and the new words “are words that strike at his brain, accumulate, cause damage. He wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism.”

I am reminded by this book of the many ways we justify the cruelest action. One in particular strikes me as apposite, the Massacre of Béziers in the year 1209. A force of crusading knights were ordered by Pope Innocent III to root out the heresy of Catharism from the South of France. Commanded by his legate, Arnaud Amalric, the abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Citeaux, the force laid siege to the place. When the citizenry refused to give up the small band of Cathars in the town, the abbot gave his infamous order: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. - “Kill them all. God will know his own.” About 20,000 inhabitants were slaughtered. The abbot was rewarded with a bishopric.

This was a case in which profoundly inhumane horror was not only permitted but promoted by the words, the necessity, of religious doctrine - ‘heretic’ dehumanised people as completely as ‘product.’ It could just as well be military, political, racial, or gender words. Expediency can become our morality almost instantly. There are indeed no limits to our ability to invent such words and to rationalise such behaviour. The horrors recounted in Agustina Bazterrica’s novel are themselves justified by this sad fact. It says what no one says often enough.

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