From Word To Word

The Atomic Cafe, directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, is the film I screened at tonight’s Dinner and a Doc. It is a remarkable film, a kind of collage that satirizes the whole of an era’s relationship to the atom using only the era’s own documents. There are no contemporary interviews, no editorial voiceovers, no expert analyses, only footage from the early atomic age, edited together in ironic and often humorous ways. This approach represents the source material in such a way that it can only satirize itself, and it forces the viewer to see the ironies in the official propaganda, the media hype, the well-intentioned education, and the opportunistic money-making that surrounded the cultural effect of the atomic bomb. The film makes unavoidable the gap between reality and what the average citizen is usually told.

I realized tonight, however, that this kind of satire only becomes effective when it is too late to be really useful. The culture in the United States during the fifties would not have interpreted much of The Atomic Cafe ironically. For many people at the time, the culture of the atomic bomb was still too present and too real, and the voices that were constructing this culture for them still held too much authority. In fact, to the degree that the editing made the irony unavoidable, mant people of that era might have found the film untruthful and irresponsible. In order for people to see and accept the irony of the film, they needed to be separated by time and culture from what was being satirized.

This is an important idea for me, because it helps explain why irony and satire are not more dominant modes in Western culture today. The problem is certainly not that there are no opportunities for them, as the success of satirical news shows like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report can attest. The problem is that the broader portion of people in our culture are still too enmeshed in their own culture, still too subject to it. They do not often see the ironies of their own political, economic, and social existence, and they do not often choose to accept these ironies when they are forced upon them. It will likely take the next generation, looking back through the lenses of our own media, to point out the absurdities in our ideas of terrorism, or national security, or ecology. Of course, by that time, it will already be much too late.

I love G. K. Chesterton, though he is not much in literary favour any more. I love how his novels feel as though they were written for a lark in fifteen minutes on the back of a restaurant napkin. I love their utter disdain for things like narrative pace and plot unity. Most of all, I love the sincerity of their absurdity.

I have just finished reading Chesterton’s The Flying Inn, a fantastical hypothesis set in a future where a kind of adulterated Islam has conquered most of the world and made alcohol illegal throughout England. The book can only be read as racist today, though this would not have occurred either to Chesterton or many of his contemporaries, but it would be unfair to the story’s other qualities if I was too dwell on this fact too much. Islam was for Chesterton merely a convenient binary for English Christian culture, which he also represents unfavourably, a binary of the sort that he loved to push to illogical and satirical extremes. In this sense, Islam is more a literary figure for Chesterton than it is a religious and political fact.

I do not have the space to discuss the text in detail, because I would like to attend to one detail in particular and to the tangent where it has led me, so I will say only that, like every Chesterton novel, there is much to love and much to hate in it. It bears certain similarities, in the central protagonist especially but also elsewhere, to his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but there is a greater seriousness to its fantasy, though not perhaps the kind of theological implications of The Man Who Was Thursday. I do recommend it, of course, along with everything else Chesterton has written and a good biography of his life.

I recommend Chesterton so heartily, not only because I enjoy him so much, which I do, but because his surreal approach to narrative has had such a tremendous, and also largely unrecognized, influence on certain strains of subsequent literature. The most obvious of these strains is that of popular fantasy, where he has been a favourite of writers from C. S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman, even making several appearances as a character in Gaimon’s Sandman series. Less obvious and less recognized is the influence that he has had on the development of magic realism in the novel, mostly because this influence is indirect through the work of Jorge Louis Borges, whose short stories and fables (see Ficciones) were a central inspiration in the kind of writing that is practised by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. Borges mentions Chesterton’s influence explicitly several times in Other Inquisitions, a collection of essays and other oddities, and I think there may be an essay or two to be written on the subject.

In any case, it was an entirely different tangent that I found myself following after reading The Flying Inn. Late in the story, Humphrey and Dalroy, the protagonists, are partaking of a giant cheese that they have taken from one of the last pubs in England, dragged all over the countryside, and shared with those they happened to meet. Wimpole, the latest friend to partake of the cheese, declares that it tastes holy, which Dalroy explains by noting that it has been on pilgrimage. He then goes on to conjecture on what sort of cow would produce a cheese that tastes so holy, saying, “I think this cheese must have come from that Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath, who had horns bigger than elephant tusks, and who was so ferocious that one of the greatest of the old heroes of chivalry was required to do battle with it.”

Now, this quotation may seem a little obscure to warrant sustained attention, except that one of my favourite books is The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, and I have often wondered about the origin of the Dun Cow, though not seriously enough to go looking for an answer. This reference to a Dun Cow, however, in a book that Wangerin might well be supposed to have read, intrigued me very much, so I decided that it was probably time that I did go looking to find what answers there might be. In the event, it is unlikely that the story Chesterton references was the inspiration for Wangerin’s title, for several reasons.

The Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath is entirely unlike the Dun Cow of Wangerin’s story. The mythic beast was huge with massive horns, one of which, more likely an elephant tusk, still sits in Warwick Castle, the supposed home of the ancient hero of chivalry that Chesterton mentions, Sir Guy of Warwick. Besides being very large, the cow’s milk was also said to be inexhaustible, but when one woman was not satisfied with a single pail of milk, the cow became angered and began rampaging over the countryside until it was slain by Sir Guy. A contemporary translation of the most famous verse description of the myth, reads as follows: “On Dunmore heath I also slew / A monstrous wild and cruel beast, / Called the Dun Cow of Dunmore Heath, / Which many people had oppressed.” This beast is not very likely the source of the Dun Cow of Wangerin’s narrative, who is a gentle and holy figure.

Now that I had begun my search, however, I was not satisfied to discover what Wangerin’s Dun Cow was not. A cursory search was all that was required to inform me that Book of the Dun Cow is actually the translated title of a 12th century Irish manuscript, the oldest to contain narrative materials. Its name comes from the myth that it was made from the hide of a cow by St. Ciarán of Clonmacnois, one of the twelve apostles of Ireland. This source is much more consistent with the character of Wangerin’s Dun Cow and also with the archaisms that Wangerin uses throughout the text, though it still does not make any clearer who the Dun Cow might be supposed to allegorize. Perhaps she might be meant to represent St. Ciarán or one of the saints more generally, though this does really account for the role that she plays in the narrative.

The result of Chesterton’s reference, then, and the subsequent directions that it has sent me, is not exactly increased clarity, but it is at least increased knowledge and also increased avenues for exploration and speculation. I now have a link to the complete translated text of the Irish Book of the Dun Cow manuscript, which I intend to read next in this little textual chain.  Hopefully it will lead to others.

Several months ago, just before I began writing this pseudo-blog, I began experimenting with the wiki format on my courseware website. I wanted to see what writing through that medium would look like, with all of my writing, even abandoned drafts and nonsense pieces, in one place, linked loosely to one another, changing and adapting as I worked with them. It was my hypothesis that this kind of format would allow the different genres, styles, degrees of completion, and individual purposes of my writing to inform each other more fully, so that I might have a better sense of my own practise, my own strengths and weaknesses. I was also hopeful that the ability of the wiki to keep old versions would give me an understanding of my process.

The experiment seemed initially successful. I posted a small number of selections from as wide a variety of my writing as a could, choosing pieces that were short and could be incorporated quickly. I began to link between them in a tentative way, trying to get a sense of what sorts of links would be useful to me as the wiki grew. This initial success continued even once I began writing in the blog format, when I began dumping selected posts into the wiki as well. However, as soon as I began to try and write new material through the wiki, I began to encounter some difficulties.

The very functions that I thought would enable me to understand my writing better actively distracted me when I came to the actual task of writing. I felt overly conscious of the versions of what I was writing, because they too would be available for others to browse, would become part of the work, like a palimpsest, but many layers deep. I also found myself concerned by the kinds of connections that a piece should have to the other texts on the wiki, since it quickly became clear that these too would become part of its literary structure. By making these allusions formal, by forcibly directing them to the readers’ attention, I was privileging them in ways that made me uncertain. It was not that I felt that it was wrong to determine these elements, because writing is always precisely this kind of determination, but I was so unfamiliar with this kind of writing that I was unable to make these choices in an informed way. In short, I spent more time thinking about how the medium was forcing itself onto the writing than I did doing the actual writing.

While these more or less theoretical distractions were certainly interesting, and I do plan to return to some of them in greater detail, I was not getting any writing accomplished. I found that I was drifting back to my old practises just so that I could progress, and I stopped using the wiki at all except to remove spam edits and make an occasional blog update. In any sense related to my writing and thinking it became almost entirely useless. So, I have decided to let the wiki die. I will not delete it entirely, because a fair amount of time and and work went into its creation, and I have learned by too frequent experience that what seems like garbage in the present sometimes finds a purpose for itself in the future. I am, however, putting it into storage, as it were, and I have no immediate plans for it.

Even so, I am more convinced than ever that wiki tools are capable of producing some interesting intellectual and artistic effects in writing. Though I found the medium to be difficult in some ways, and though I do not have the time or the energy to persevere through this difficulty at the moment, there is an opportunity there to do something that is at least novel and perhaps even useful, if any one is so inclined.

I need to preface this post by saying that cheese is something of a religion in my family. My paternal grandfather was a dairy farmer. My father is a professor of food science specializing in dairy and in cheese making. I was weaned on yoghurt and buttermilk and cheese, most of it made by students, much of it made with questionable quality, some of it made to be intentionally odd, either coloured green or pink or flavoured with strange spices. When I was young, we made our own yoghurt. We hung around the university labs, stealing cheese curds and watching milk be pasteurized. We wandered through the rooms where the cheese was aged, all filled with the singular smell of mould and ripening cheese. Even today, we treat cheese like some people treat wine or scotch. Cheese is a passion.

So, this past weekend, when my family attended my step-brother’s wedding in Toronto, it should come as no surprise that we gathered early and long around the cheese platters, tasting what there was to taste. Most of it was good, if unspectacular, but there was one cheese that was in my opinion both good and spectacular. It was a gouda, but unlike most of the Dutch goudas I have eaten, which are firm with a nutty kind of taste, this gouda was textured much more like a crumbly old chedder, and its nuttiness had the intensity of an old chedder’s flavour as well. When I saw it on the plate, I assumed it was a gouda, After I had eaten it, I actually had to ask my father to confirm what it was, so different was it in both texture and flavour from what I was expecting.

Later, I located the label from one of the trays. It was indeed a gouda, and the only gouda that is made in Ontario, at Thunder Oak Cheese Farm near Thunder Bay. Apparently it is possible to go there, have a coffee, and watch them make the cheese on certain days of the week. I will certainly do so if I am ever that far North, but for the time being, I will have to content myself by ordering their gouda from afar.

My late father-in-law’s peonies bloomed this morning. They were his favourite flower. His front lawn was always centred by a tremendously large speciman that was famous in the neighbourhood. After he died and my mother-in-law came to live with us, she took two clumps of the legendary front lawn peony with her and planted them in my back yard. This was their first spring at our place, and we were warned that, though they transplant well, they do not often bloom for the first year or two in their new location. I was worried that they would not even survive, but very early on in the spring we saw shoots, and several days ago we saw some blossoms, and today there were blooms.

I am tempted to say something here about the work of mourning and of memorial, but everything seems a little inadequate. I will only say that we miss Willie, and we are glad for the reminder of him.

I was very disappointed in Miseducation, a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays supposedly on education. The book is edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo, and represents itself to be an analysis of schooling and education, which is why I bought and read it. I am very interested in how education, learning, schooling, teaching, curriculum, and pedagogy function in political and cultural terms. I was hoping that Chomsky would be able to contribute something significant to my thinking of these questions.

Instead, by far the greater part of the volume addresses issues of media misinformation, one of Chomsky’s most common, if perhaps also most necessary, themes. It is only the first two essays that speak to the question of schooling and education directly, and only the first that does so in any sustained way. What there is about education specifically is what you would expect of Chomsky, that is, schools play a central role in maintaining a system of control by socializing students to believe that supporting the interests of those in power is necessary to survival. So far so predictable, and perhaps so true, but I could have written as much myself. I had hoped that I would find a deeper and more systematic analysis of the educational system, in the same mode as Chomsky has critiqued the media, but I found instead some tangential remarks that were never developed into a coherent and consistent argument.

Of course, the fault here is not Chomsky’s. He was not the one who gathered these particular papers and chose to publish them under the title of Miseducation. It was not his intention in any of the collected papers to provide the systematic analysis that I wanted and that I was led to expect. The fault here is Macedo’s, whose Miseducation, unfortunately, is mostly a misrepresentation.

Breathe unuttered words through the night,
unspoken things less heard than felt,
like warm breath on a pillowed cheek,
hands brushing hands beneath linen,
the swelling of another’s sleep,
the silent and contented words
that rest about us in the dark,
like moonlight on a coverlet,
the singing of nocturnal things,
an arm beneath a lover’s head.

I have had several conversations in the past few weeks about my understanding of encountering the other, an idea that I have written about several times, most recently in a post on the idea of Social Holocaust. There are two sorts of objections that people are making to this idea: first, that it privileges a sort of extroversion and gregariousness and fails to value solitude; and second, that it sets up an ideal of the encounter that real encounter always fails to achieve, an argument that resembles very closely the concern of TC’s comments on Being at Home. Both of these objections are valid to a degree, and I would like to nuance my argument in order to account for them.

To the first objection, that my privilege of encounter fails to recognize the value of solitude, I would suggest a distinction between the word ’solitude’ and the word ‘isolation’, arguing that encounter requires the first but is absolutely opposed to the second. In order that I encounter the other truly and properly, in order that I be able to respond to this encounter truly and properly, I must be prepared to listen and watch for the other, must be prepared to open myself to encounter with the other, and this preparedness requires of me not less solitude but more. Solitude, in this sense, is a deliberate and practised aloneness in which I encounter myself as other so that I may be prepared to encounter the other as other also. This solitude is a practice of aloneness that consists precisely in turning me outward toward openness.

Solitude is therefore absolutely distinct from isolation, which turns not to openness but to closedness, both to the self and the other. Whereas solitude is practised in a disciplined aloneness, isolation can be and often is practised in the crowd, where the sheer amount of superficial contact with everyone functions to shield me from really encountering anyone, where the crowd permits me to be so shallowly acquainted as to be virtually anonymous. This kind of isolation prevents both real encounter and real solitude. It is the practise of distraction from encounter and from solitude, through mere social stimulus, through the use of technological apparatus, through the acceptance of certain social institutions and infrastructures, and through acquiescence to certain cultural pressures. It is the kind of isolation that occurs when spouses read in bed to avoid speaking to one another, when friends spend their time together talking to others on their cellphones to avoid having to look each other in the eye, when people refuse to allow others into their homes for fear that their real lives will be exposed. It is a practise that says, “We will talk later when others are around, so that we will have an excuse not to mention what we are really feeling and thinking,” that says, “We can talk later on the phone when I am with someone else, so that I will not have to look into your eyes or anyone else’s,” and that says, “We will have you over later, when the house is clean, and when we are having a party, so you will see us at our best and we will not really have to share with one another.” It is what Derrida describes as “lethal isolation.”

It is just as difficult, therefore, for the extrovert as for the introvert to be open to the other, for the extrovert’s socialization can isolate as easily as the introvert’s separation. Encountering the other is not a matter of having more acquaintances, or going to more clubs, or holding more dinner parties, it is a matter of holding oneself open to the possibility that, at any moment and in any manner, I may be encountered by the other. I will not know who this other is. No activity of mine will discover this other to me. I can only make myself open, before I know who this other will be, and wait to be encountered. The practise of this discipline is not simple, either for the introvert or the extrovert.

All of this brings me to the second objection, that this ideal of encounter with the other will not always or ever be discovered in a real encounter with the other. TC expresses something like this in the observation that not everyone’s home matches the ideal home for which I am constantly advocating. In both cases, however, in the encounter and the home, which are inextricably linked for me, I would argue that this inadequacy is the essential and constitutive risk. There is no openness to encounter and no hospitality of the home that is not an openness and a hospitality to the possibility of hostility, violence, and death. To a certain degree, every openness will always be an openness to this violence, because there can never be pure encounter, can never be encounter with the other that is not immediately reduced to a relationship with another. In other words, all encounter, all hospitality, is inadequate to what it desires to be, which introduces an unavoidable violence into the act of encounter. As Emmanuel Levinas says, playing on a double meaning in the French, the host is always also the hostage to the one who is invited. The host always invites the one who will make him a hostage. There is no avoiding this violence.

In this sense TC is absolutely right. Every home fails to be a home in some respects, and some fail in almost every respect. Yet, the failure of the home, even at its worst, should by no means render the ideal of the home less desirable. What it should do, what it does do, is ask of us at least two things. First, it asks that we never confuse what is of the home and of the encounter and what is not, that we always distinguish clearly between what belongs to these ideals. Second, it asks that we always strive to approach the ideal of the home and the encounter, even and especially because we recognize that this ideal is not some concrete object that can ever be realised.

Those who are concerned with the home need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were beaten or neglected or abused, but that was not of the home; that was a violence done to you in the place where a home should have been. Come, let me invite you into my home. It also falls short of the ideal. It also admits that it does not wholly know what this ideal might be. Even so, it strives to be a home as best it can. Come strive with us, and when you go from us, to wherever it is that you will go, strive to make it a home also, as best you can, because there are many who looked for a home and found none, because there are many who need your home to be their home as well.”

In the same way, those who are concerned with encounter need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were hurt, and abandoned, and rejected, but that was not of the encounter; that was a violence done to you in the place where the encounter should have been. Come, now that we have encountered one another, let us strive to bear the responsibility of one another as best we can, though we admit that we will never be adequate to our ideal, and though we admit that we do not wholly know what this ideal might be. Though we must always be parting, let us go from one another, striving to be open to the other also, because there are many who have been hurt and many who have been abandoned, and they need those who will bear with them as well.”

We who are concerned with home and with encounter need to be willing to say and to do these things, even though they are a terrible risk, because we ask others and ourselves to be open to being neglected and abused again, hurt and abandoned again, because we can never guarantee that we will be adequate to the ideals of the home and of the responsibility of the encounter, because we will certainly and in every case fall short of these ideals. What we say and do always bears this risk, and those we ask to join us will always bear this risk as well. There is nothing more terrible than this, which is why it is always easier for me to isolate myself, even if I know that it will be lethal. It is always easier to allow myself to be distracted from the other, to guard the thresholds of the home. I cannot mitigate this risk and this terror, and I would not do so if I could.

I was recently able to find a copy of Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion from an online bookseller who operates out of Guelph, and it has reminded me of how much I love Williams’ novels. Though very few remember him any longer and those who do only as a name peripherally associated with J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, Williams was highly regarded in his own time by such writers as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for his poetry, criticism, history, theology, and drama, as well as for his novels.

I first encountered Williams’ name among the members of the Inklings, a literary society that grew up around Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford, but it was through mere chance that I first read any of his work. I was looking in a used bookstore for something by T. S. Eliot, I forget exactly what, when I found among Eliot’s works a copy of Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve, for which Eliot wrote an introduction. I knew the name, and the book was priced at all of two dollars, so I took it to the counter, where the proprietor told me that he had just taken in another of Williams’ novels, Many Dimensions. I bought both.

I can hardly describe the experience of reading those two books together, because they are so unique in mood and sensibility. Though Lewis’ That Hideous Strength has many similarities, clearly informed by Williams’ fiction, there is nothing quite like a Charles Williams novel. I always describe his books by saying that they are to mystical theology what good science fiction is to science. Just as true science fiction is the fictional exploration of a scientific hypothesis, so Williams’ novels are the fictional exploration of a mystical or theological idea. The stories are set in Williams’ present time, but each relates a scenario in which this present time is disrupted by supernatural events. The result is always eerie and sometimes even horrific, as the central characters, usually conflicted in regard to their religious faith but nevertheless moving toward Christian principles, struggle against strange and terrifying powers.

The novels are not great literature, though they approach it more closely than most thrillers do, and Williams is not a great novelist, though he is perhaps a great storyteller. His characters are full and complex, but they do not strike a contemporary ear as being realistic. His philosophising is sometimes profound, but it often breaks the flow of the narrative. Where he really excels is in creating a sense of mood. The books are all profoundly disturbing, as if their fiction somehow falls too close to a truth, as if it might yet become a truth. They are hauntingly possible, not physically perhaps, but spiritually. Though they may not rank very highly in the history of literature, I would choose them over any number of those that are usually placed above them.

Gordon Lester, a friend from my time in the MA English program at the University of Guelph, has recently been contacted by someone arranging publicity for Gayatri Spivak, the famous theorist who wrote, among other things, the introduction without which I would not understand Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology even to the very small degree that I do. Apparently, Spivak would like to use Gordon’s painting, Gayatri Spivak with Bear, in the promotional material for her CRASSH lecture in Cambridge, England on October 9th. Gordon has produced a whole series of pictures depicting famous theorists with bears, of which I have the Naomi Klein original. If you are interested to see the whole series, there is a link to Gordon’s site in my blogroll.