SubscribeMarch 24th, 2011
having a degree doesn’t mean you can think
Lilian has a link over at her site to a review of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The book is by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.
It is one of the nastiest and funniest reviews I’ve read in a long while. If the book is even 20% as bad as the review implies the authors need to turn in whatever degrees they may have been presented with in the past. Clearly they didn’t actually earn them.
Here’s a taste:
To get a healthier responsiveness to sacred rushes Dreyfus and Kelly go back to Homer, who (they say) had no sense of an inner life.
Ouch. Really? Homer had no inner life? Oh boy.
They even say that Helen is a goddess, since dia gynaikōn can mean that. It does not, without the addition of theāōn (to describe, for instance, Hera).
Man. Even basic scholarly knowledge is lacking?
The fall from Homer’s sublime superficiality occurs, in this book, when Augustine invents interiority. He does this by merging the specific time and space of Jesus with the timeless essences of Greek philosophy. “Augustine was the first important Christian to interpret Christianity using the categories of Greek philosophy.” Anyone who knows anything about either Augustine or Greek philosophy knows that this is nonsense.
Gosh. It’s a bit like Creationists speaking about evolution. Think they’re infiltrating the humanities now?
It is hard to imagine how Dreyfus and Kelly could get sillier about Augustine, but they meet the challenge. They say that he invented the inner life of the mind. “Augustine had to get people to realize that they had an inner life.” How did he do this? By pointing out that Ambrose was seen reading the Bible silently. “Apparently, in Augustine’s time everyone read aloud.” This is a myth that Bernard Knox destroyed years ago.
Say what? Augustine invented the inner life of the mind? Wowzers. How stupid can you be and still keep breathing.
Anyway, there’s more. Have fun reading.
February 13th, 2011
bookmarks and historical connections
I use old index cards as bookmarks. Most of the time I no longer notice what is written on them, it’s just some old project long finished or abandoned. But today, reading Philosophy in the Flesh, the words on the index card securing my place in the argument for embodied realism flashed.
Thinking idly about a definition just presented to me in the text, one that defines the idea of “real”, the date 1750 and Mandan get horses seemed somehow apropos. Not sure why exactly, but it was enough of a poke to get me to read the rest of the card.
1750 Mandan get horses←from Kiowa and Pawnee←who got them in 1720 from the Comanchee. The Assiniboine (1770) and Cree (1750) get them from the Mandan.
It’s from a project all about trade routes, and the things (horses and disease, for example) that move between the human worlds that exist in the Americas of the 1700s. That last bit, the Mandan world to the Assiniboine and the Cree, that horse path was also one path by which small pox spread once it had been brought into Mandan country on fur-trader river boats. I can’t help but think about the changes these things wrought in the idea of what is “real.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever lived where what you own you have to carry, and can therefore imagine what it means to have a horse as well as a dog, but it is hard to over-estimate the change the horse brought. Changes of this magnitude must alter forever what is considered real. The power the extra physical possibility brings broadens everything—what you can carry, what you can own, how much land is yours to hunt, what you can expect your neighbor to bring to the next camp. In it’s own way, a horse enables Indian consumerism I suppose. Even if it is in the form of painted lodge skins and multiple iron pots.
I wonder what it would look like to keep a running thought-log in two wildly different circumstances? I’ve lived with children where I had to pull my 2-year-old half way up the mountain to the cabin in February. Then go back for the rest. I’ve also lived where I can ring a bell and have tea brought to me. The things you think about are not the same and I suspect, what conceptual forms I currently utilize, carry the echo of those two lives and how I’ve had to live them. It seems a simple thing the manner of living effecting the manner of one’s concepts, but this idea of embodied realism is much more radical than it first appears.
December 18th, 2010
cultural appropriation/what it is and isn’t
Over at Letter from Hardscrabble Creek there is a comment relating to Clifton’s sense of hilarity about “earnest” Pagans that lecture “about ‘cultural appropriation’.” Clifton’s right of course. No Pagan got to be one without appropriating the hell out of history. But it’s really the comment (@Karen A. Scofield) that I want to address. In in she says “not all cultural appropriation is bad. Some is, like doing sweat lodges without enough knowledge and background.”
To talk about this I need to tell you just a little about my “lineage.” A big part of my family are from the Salishan language group. Then there’s some Kootenai, some Blackfoot, some Shoshone, some Yakima and others too. Racially/ethnically I’m mostly Briton, with Jew, Gypsy, Saxon and probably some Welsh (if what I know of the family history is correct.) I’m not an Indian, I’m what, in Rez speak, would be called a “breed.” Then so are we all.
We humans are a travelling species and have been since we were properly not even human but Homo erectus. And I bet those “cousins” weren’t so different from us. When human women travel we tend to collect bodily secretions from some of those we meet along the way and when human men travel they tend to leave a decent sized sample of theirs for the edification of the locals. Some of those travel exchanges ended up as kiddies, and so our “breedness” is continued.
So that’s that. We travel, we exchange goods, ideas and bits of our selves and have been doing that from before we were human at all. And really, that kind of takes some of the “oh, so awful” out of the charge of cultural appropriation. And in Indian Country: I mean if you go to a big Powwow today you are going to see some Ojibwa dancing in a plains style outfit, to a drum that might be from one of the southwest tribes, and likely carrying some beadwork style that originated with the Cree (and they were mixed Indian and French.) So there is no “pure” anywhere. “Pure” is a narrative, an idea that has a BIG ideological baggage train behind it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of human history.
However, there is something to be said about what Karen had to say about the sweat. The man that is the head of my family tells us that the sweat is to be used. He invites anyone who wants to listen to the spirits, who wants to heal themselves, to come and sweat. According to him there is no “wrong” way, except if you are “told” by the spirits what to do and you ignore that. There are no “rules” exactly—except for basic respect. That whole thing about the “right” way is largely from a specific set of cultures that are big on hierarchy anyway. And it is a political device that was born out of the need to survive white contact, but that’s another whole post and one I’m unlikely to write.
What’s true is that if you claim to be running an “authentic Sioux sweat”, I don’t care if you’re Sioux or not, you probably got it mixed up and I doubt your Aunty would approve. The sweat is a methodology, a known way of getting the body, the mind, the spirit, ready to listen to the songs, to the spirits, the animals, the other powers. It’s a technology for getting humans in the “place” where they can listen to what is already shouting in their ear. It’s like Zen. The “right” way to practice zazen is to sit still and listen. You don’t need a fancy anything, the seat cushion doesn’t have to be the right colour or the right size. Just so, the right way to do a sweat is to go in with respect for the wood, the rocks, the willow, the water, the fire, the blankets, your skin (I not glad to be around people who try to burn you out of a sweat as a kind of one-up-manship), the songs and each other. Go in with respect, sing, get hot and listen. Then come out and get clean. And don’t brag around about how holy you are, not even to yourself. That’s it.
What you don’t want to do is think that this makes you an Indian. It doesn’t. I don’t care how many lessons some Indian charged you for, or how many real Indian names you got in some weekend ceremony, none of that makes you Indian. It may be important, the names you got. Those times may have taught you wonderful things, but all that means is that you are what you are with some additional knowledge, and hopefully, wisdom. The presumption of so simple an identity change, the most egregious kind of identity theft, that’s really the only kind of “appropriation” you want to avoid. Mostly that’s because it is dangerous to you, because it is an illusion, but also, it is essentially and deeply disrespectful of the long-term alliance between the Earth of their homeland and the People who have listened to It for countless generations. And I would have thought being a Pagan is really about that respect, that alliance. Learn from it, sure. But don’t mock it by claiming it for your own. Build your own alliance. That way it’ll be real and true.
October 2nd, 2010
The eye or the ear?
There is a fascinating paragraph in Picture Theory that occurs near the opening of the chapter on visible language and William Blake.
What is it that writing and grammatology exclude or displace? Nothing more or less than the image—the picture, likeness, or simulacrum— and the iconology that aspires to be its science. If “différance” is the key term of grammatolgy, “similitude” is the central notion of iconology. If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy. Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject. Derrida mainly speaks of the struggle of writing with voice, but the addition of vision and image reveals the writer’s dilemma on another flank. How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see?
The paragraph went bong-bong-bong in my head and throughout this day I have returned to it repeatedly trying to let surface the chord it struck. No go so far.
To track this elusive illumination/understanding I had to open out some of the terms. Différance, for example. As I understand it différance refers to the relationship between event (the singular, non-repeatable experience of life in this moment) and machine (machine-like repeatability; the chemical and physical nature of the inorganic). Both event and machine express themselves in human beings as kinds of thinking that appear to be incommensurate yet, according to Derrida, each is internal to the other and yet remain independent.
This analysis has implications for the production of meaning in text. Words get their meaning by how they differ from other words. The example in the Wikipedia article linked above used the word “house.” “House” gets its meaning by “how it differs from “shed”, “mansion”, “hotel”, “building”, etc.” Since other words impact the meaning of “house,” no final meaning is ever achieved—there is always going to be a gap—or a circle / meaning travels around it, a semantic ouroboros and words link, ultimately, only to each other.
So that’s différance. What then is similitude and iconology? Where grammatology is the study of writing, iconology is the study of imagery; and where difference is the leavening agent with respect to meaning production in text, similarity/ resemblance is the yeast which enables visual communication. Similitude is also the source of Mitchell’s insistence that text and image are both forms of representation and not merely in opposition to each other. He says, in a footnote:
I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.
What it seems to me is that différance is an aspect of image/text and what Mitchell is trying to do is move to a place more inclusive of the work done by representation. Hence the focus on similitude. But what of the passage that starts, “if writing is the medium of absence and artifice…”?
To address this is as simple as reflecting on the choice of conceptual mirror in the chapter. William Blake and his text+images and typography are both the conceptual bearers and the narrators of meaning. It is perhaps easiest seen in the last section that is devoted to Blake’s type. It is, first of all, a hand-produced, repeated pattern (hand drawn on copper plate for reproduction). That is, by being both event and machine, Blake’s type straddles the différance gap. One example Mitchell uses is the script that creates the word “marriage.” It was
inscribed in flowing engraver’s calligraphy, and the tails of the letters merge with the vegetative forms in the pictured scene, Blake literally embodies in the calligraphic form of “marriage the symbolic marriage that his “types” prefigure in the text of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
By doing this Blake draws in our other senses, declares text as integral to the world and reaches a place where senses create an experience rather than a loosely jumbled set of different sensations. In Mitchell’s words, “Blake wants a writing that will make us see with our ears and hear with our eyes because he wants to transform us into revolutionary readers, to deliver us from the notion that history is a closed book to be taken in one sense.” That is, meaning is not either of the eye nor of the ear. Meaning is of the senses wound together into that of which the hand is capable.
As for that last sentence—How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see? That’s the question, yes? My specific iteration of it is how to make the reader see sound. Don’t know yet, may never know, but nevertheless, I will keep struggling to find a form that allows for it. Rock on Blake!
August 21st, 2010
track bear track
Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.
Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.
For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.
I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.
I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”
This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.
All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.
For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.
August 6th, 2010
Silence: discernment and reality
I am struggling with a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. I actually quite like it and there are parts that resonate deeply with my own experience of silence. The problem I am having is that the book is so resolutely Christian.
Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).
She uses two quotes as reference points.
You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)
We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)
Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.
The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like. I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.” This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity). The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.
Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.
I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.
“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)
This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.
It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.
Does Maitland’s division matter? I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.
July 4th, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 3
In part 2 I asked this question. “So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?”
The only way I can understand this idea is to acknowledge the world that we cannot grasp through language. But this is unclear. Is there a world we language users can grasp without language? Thought about another way, experience of the world is profoundly changed by language concepts and structures. Still unclear. While probably true, this says nothing about what impacts language concepts and structures. What if those structures are reflections of the pre-linguistic world?
Let me try this:
1. Our species experienced things prior to its acquisition of language.
2. Species without language communicate.
3. Recent research in embodied cognition suggests that intelligence, reason and language are physically grounded.
4. Evolution tends to work by using existing structures and patterns of organization (whether physical or behavioural) and finding new and useful ways to use them.
5. The world is all that is the case. But contra Wittgenstein, I also think that the physical world is enough to explain the language world.
Things get sticky after this.
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)
As a poet and person with a whole raft of unusual perceptual experiences under her belt I find it almost impossible not to experience language as a entity distinct from me. I also find it impossible not to experience the world as a thinking being. I can do it but by dint of mental brute force but I cannot maintain it. Does this mean I believe these things? No. Not without evidence other than my experience of it.
I had a dream some years ago in which my synesthesia played a crucial role. In the dream I come to consciousness inside the head of a bear. That is, I am aware that I am dreaming and I am neurologically tied into the bear’s head. I still maintain my own human circuitry so there are limitations to what each sense can experience but what senses I do have can be reconfigured for the duration of the “ride.” For example, if I was in the head of a hummingbird, I wouldn’t be able to see ultraviolet as the hummingbird can because, as a human being, I simply don’t have those receptors. However, I would be able to use some sense to pick up on those frequencies – perhaps it would come in as a particular tonal group.
In the dream about the bear I smell the world with the bear but what I perceive comes in visually. I see the scent trails as coloured ribbons. The dream allows me to understand that the bear’s relationship to time is different from mine because it can smell time as scent potency. In other words, the bear’s physical (sensory and cognitive) structures organize and limit basic concepts such as time. The same organizational potential must be true for us since we evolved with the same basic environmental forces in place. Some things are important for us to know about and some are not and since no one species can sense all of it, each species has a limited, but viable, range of sensory input available to it. Perceiving too much would not promote longevity. You’d never be able to sort through it fast enough to deal with sudden danger.
So now I have an experience that I think of as a bear’s. My knowledge of bear anatomy almost certainly had something to do with how my mind came to understand the effect of sensory organization on conceptual foundations but has that really anything to do with an actual bear’s experience? And does it matter?
For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.
Still, we think of memes as operating on people – that memes use people to propogate themselves as genes do. Having said that, there is no way in which human genes or human memes can exist without people. They have no intentions in the reasoned sense of the word. As an example: There are cultural ideas that work poorly in current situated human activities and there are ones that work to foster human feelings of success. The cultural ideas that promote desirable feelings are going to be repeated, i.e. be replicated or spread. There is no need for the idea to have a mind of its own.
I can think of the Phenomenological “thing” like this. Using the gene analogy, words are the bases but perhaps the 5-carbon sugar and the phosphate group are sensory structures and embodied experience and the “thing” that results – the particular gene of this analogy – is independent of us only in the sense that it is first an echo and product of us and our history.
May 14th, 2010
Dorion Woman and her interpreters
The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.
If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.
We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.
Time tells much about women’s interpreters. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30. Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpreter” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.
But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol. However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.” A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…
(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”
To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.
Jeez.
Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidental fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.
The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.
(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)
What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.
Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!
meh
Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.
April 9th, 2010
Words – “to coddle”
When I cook eggs for breakfast generally I prefer them coddled. That is, cooked without their shell in water just below boiling point. Where I live most people call this type of egg “poached.” Although I am sure both words can (and are) used interchangeably, I think they really carry different instructions. When I poach fish, for example, the water actually reaches a very slow boil or what this woman calls a slow simmer.
When I coddle eggs I don’t use a pipkin or a coddler, I just gently pour out the egg onto a shallow saucer and then when the water is the right temperature slide the egg into the hot water where the water meets the side of the pan. This way the egg stays together and doesn’t shred into the water making it all cloudy and the egg inedible.
I prefer the word “coddle” to “poach.” It has something to do with the sound itself, but also the words are resonant with meaning. They go off in my head in ways that create different sensations. ”Coddle” is something that evokes warm-bliss-raisin-toast-and-butter feelings. ”Poached” is a too-long-at-the-beach-tight-face sort of word for me. I mean, really, how do you think the salmon feels?
So with my toast and tea I am having coddled eggs. It makes me feel better, even if while writing this I have forgotten to check the water and my egg is just a touch ragged.
April 3rd, 2010
Charles Lamb and deep delight
I have little acquaintance with Charles Lamb and until I purchased The Essays of Elia I had only read one of his poems and that assigned in an English class somewhere, at some time. The Old Familiar Faces is a bit sentimental for my tastes and so though his name (and that of his sister Mary) had floated around in the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I had read nothing of him that made me understand the felt equivalence of the authors.
And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.
He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.
For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.
In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.
Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.
That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.
It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?
More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.