What I will write is that I am confronted by something that I might call the unrecognizability of God, by which I mean, not the nonapperance of God, for I will unjustifiably assume this appearance in advance, but the impossibility of recognizing the God who appears.  This God, the God who appears, the God who is revealed, the God who would in Christian terms be called the Christ, is unrecognizable because he must always appear according to the measure of human understanding.  To whatever degree the Christ might be said to be the appearance of God, a degree that is traditionally held to be absolute, he must still appear only in the limited ways that the human mind can comprehend.  To appear in other ways would be not to appear at all, at least not to human minds.  Yet, by appearing only according to the limits of human understanding, the Christ can never be recognized definitively and unmistakably as God.  The Christ can only appear as human, never as God.

This is why even John the Baptist, the one who prophesied that the Christ was soon to come, the one who baptised him, the one who witnessed the Holy Spirit descend on him, the one who heard a voice from heaven affirming him as the son of God, sends disciples to Jesus to ask if he is really the Christ or if they should expect another.  This is why Mary Magdalene sees and speaks with Jesus when he approaches her as she mourns at his apparently empty tomb, but does not know him until he calls her name.  This is why the two disciples on the road to Emmaus walk with Jesus for hours, speak with him about the scriptures, and invite him into their home, but do not recognize him until he breaks bread for them.  This is why the eleven remaining disciples, those who were closest to Jesus, see him on the beach, speak with him, obey him when he tells them to drop their nets in the other side of the boat, but do not know him until their nets are miraculously filled.

Again and again, those who would most be expected to recognize Jesus as the Christ fail even to recognize him as the Jesus they have followed and served.  It is as if there is some quality in him, or some quality in his appearing, that hides him from them.  Though they see him, and though they speak to him, they fail to know him for what he is, and even when they do finally recognize him, it does not seem to be through any act of their own.  Christ speaks their names or breaks their bread or fills their nets, and they, quite apart from their own will and activity, find that Christ has become recognized in them, as if according to a will and an act that is not their own.

It is in this way that Anna and Simeon recognize the infant Christ.  They do nothing to effect this recognition.  They simply see him and know him according to a sight and a knowledge that is not their own.  They receive this recognition.  They do not accomplish it.

This is also the case, and more explicitly, when Jesus, many years later, asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”  Though the disciples initially defer the responsibility of this question, choosing instead to offer the opinions of other people, Jesus is insistent, and it is finally Peter who says, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”  It is then that Christ makes clear that it is not Peter who has in fact recognized him for the Christ.  “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you,” he tells Peter, “but my Father who is in heaven.”

When the Christ is recognized. therefore, it is not a recognition of God by the human.  It is a recognition of God by God that merely takes place in and through the human.  Peter does not himself recognize the Christ, does not recognize the appearance of God as such.  It is God who recognizes God in and through Peter.  The movement is entirely distinct from Peter, occurring through him rather than by him.  The recognition of Jesus as the Christ occurs apart from any act of Peter’s own.

Of course, it may be argued, and with some justice, that the Christ is recognized through Peter because Peter has actively pursued this recognition, actively made himself open to it, actively sought so that he might find it.  I will not deny this.  I will only insist that, however good and right these activities might be, whatever role they might play in determining whether God will indeed perform this recognition in Peter, none of them are capable of accomplishing the recognition of the Christ as such.  Only God accomplishes this recognition in him.  Only God recognizes God.  Peter can merely ask that this recognition might occur in him.

I think that this structure of recognition is essential, not essential to God, surely, for nothing can be said about the essence of God, but essential to how God appears to us: it is not sufficient that God appear to us, because we can never recognize God for what God is.  It is always necessary also that God recognize God through us and in us, for only God can accomplish this recognition.

This means, of course, that any recognition of God will be radically without guarantee, since no logic and no proof will suffice to effect this recognition or to demonstrate it, even to myself.  This is why the recognition of the Christ can never become a knowledge.  If it is a knowing, it is a knowing that is otherwise than knowledge, a knowing that might be called better, if still inadequately, a faith.

When I say, therefore, “This is the Christ, the son of the living God,” this confession can never justify a coercive or militant religiosity.  It can only be a cry or an exclamation, like a gasp of pain or pleasure.  It must only be my own recognition, always inadequate, of what has been recognized in and through me, always without guarantee.

If I fear, it is because I do not know truly that I am loved.  If I knew truly, if I knew perfectly, how perfectly I am loved, I would never fear.  To take courage is only to trust in perfect love, though I can can never know it perfectly.  It is to seek perfect love, to find it out, to dwell in it, and fear will find itself cast away, because it cannot abide where love abides.

This preoccupation is experienced as a kind of agony, because it always falls short of its intention until the moment when it can no longer be preoccupied at all. It will never succeed in crossing the threshold, never succeed in broaching the limit, for when the moment of death arrives, it is always too short, too prolonged, too sudden, too delayed, too sharp, too dull to be recognized for what it is, and so my preoccupation will always fail to know the moment of my death, no matter how attentive it is, no matter how watchful. The only death which my preoccupation will discover is a death that I have survived, and therefore not my death at all. Any limit that it can surpass will have left my limit intact.

If I persist, then, in a preoccupation with the limit and with the beyond of the limit, it will always be the case that I will need to occupy the moment of death repeatedly, not to cross it, which will always remain impossible until the moment when it becomes unrepresentable, but to survive it in the expectation that there will come a death which I will not survive. I cross the limit of the threshold, not expecting to find its beyond, which will forever remain inaccessible to me, but in order to inhabit the threshold as a kind of waiting for the threshold that remains to be crossed. Thus, a concern for the limit and its beyond is experienced as the agony of a death that does not kill, the agony of threshold that opens only onto another threshold. Any attempt to avoid this pain and this agony, this repetition, would necessarily abandon the limit and its beyond.

The film’s strength is the tone that it is able to maintain.  Most holocaust films, and most films dealing with similarly horrific events, tend to rely for their effect on the kind of emotional responses that people have to the shocking images.  They are less aesthetic objects with their own aesthetic sensibility, then they are an exploitation of an object of horror to provoke emotions in the viewer.  As a response to this approach, other films have attempt to remain rigorously factual, presenting the objects of horror with an attitude of detachment, which is equally mi representative of its subject.

Night and Fog, however, avoids both of these extremes.  While it does present much disturbing archival material, and while it does include much information about the holocaust, it does so in a way that is less concerned with these things than in creating an aesthetic object that would do justice to these things.  In juxtaposition to the archival footage, it presents long and continuous shots of the Nazi death camps more than a decade after they were captured by the allies.  The camps are eerily empty, overgrown with vegetation, littered with the implements of their former occupants.  It is easy to imagine that ghostly hands still wield the machinery of death, that spectral prisoners in their multitudes are still herded into the death chambers and fed into the ovens.

The effect of the archival images and Resnais’ new shots together is a violent disjunction.  The lived horror of the one is brutally opposed to the ghostly tranquility of the other, and the relationship between them is reduced to an always inadequate memorial of the one by the other.  The juxtapositin  says, in effect, that it is impossible to recapture the events of the holocaust, that it is only possible to remember them in one fashion or another, and also that our forms of memory have been and continue to be implicated in the kinds of violence that is being remembered.  The narrator himself makes this argument as the film closes, noting that the memory of the holocaust has not prevented the occurrence of similar atrocities since, a fact that our forms of memorial fail to remember.

It is this occluded memory that I find so difficult in the celebration of Remembrance Day, and it is this occluded memory that I tried to explain to my class on Sunday.  I certainly do recognize the importance of remembering the things that we remember, but I am disturbed that our remembrance of these things is too often a refusal to remember the many other things that similarly need a memorial, a refusal to remember our own participation in these other things, a refusal to remember that these things are occurring even now and that we are even now implicated in them.  For many years, there was a slogan attached to Remembrance day: “Never Again”.  We repeated these words to each other, year after year, comfortably separated by time and geography from the events that we were remembering, and failing absolutely to recognize that wwhat we were remembering was happening again and again, continually.

To the extent, therefore, that Remembrance Day is a call to remember particular wars in particular places, I would say that it can only prevent us from truly remembering.  In order for it to produce in us a true memorial, it must always also be a recollection of ongoing war and violence and atrocity, a refusal to ignore the fact of these things in our past and in our present.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.

First, from a technical perspective, the elements in a database are never actually equal in significance. They are always entered in a sequence, and they are assigned their position in a sequence. Some element will always occupy the first position (1,1) and will function as a beginning. Some element will always occupy the final position (x,x) and will function as an ending. Other elements will always occupy the positions between them and will function as a development. This beginning, this ending, and this development will always combine to form a narrative, even if this narrative is only of the simplest kind, even if it only says, “Look, though there are only seemingly random numbers, here is the highest number and here is the lowest, and here is the one that is repeated most,” even if it only says, “Look, though there are only unrepeated and seemingly meaningless symbols, this one looks something like this one that came before it, and there seem to be many symbols that have curves, while only a few have angles.”

No matter how random and meaningless the elements of the database might seem to be, these narrative functions are always operative, because of the conventions that govern reading and writing, whether these are the coded conventions of a machine reader or the social conventions of a human reader. Even if the writers or the readers do not in fact follow the established conventions of the code or of the culture, they must nevertheless follow some convention, must produce some sort of narrative, and must always do so in the context of what the established convention is, even if only through opposition to these conventions. It will never be possible for them to write or read without a narrativity, and it will never be possible for this narrativity to be entirely dissociated from the established narrative conventions.

Second, every element in the database is itself the function of one or more narratives. It is always artificially isolated from a story that is ongoing in the world beyond the database, even and especially if the elements are random numbers chosen for their randomness, even and especially if they are only meaningless symbols created for the purpose of meaninglessness, even and especially if they are only natural elements chosen for their naturalness. In every case they will be the products, the signs, the representations of at least one and probably many narratives.

To ignore the role of these source narratives in determining the data in the database is to ignore their physicality, their historicity, their locality. These sources are not always visible through the data that they produce, but they are nevertheless essential to the production of the data as such. In this sense, the database might even be said to be more narrative even than a traditional narrative, because it combines all of its source narratives into a single master narrative while still maintaining these sources as separate narrative elements in ways that are difficult for traditional narratives to accomplish.

Third, it is obvious, particularly in light of the kind of work that Jacques Derrida and others have done on the function of the archive, that it is impossible to understand the database apart from the narrative of its own production. In every case, the database is constructed by a particular producer for a particular purpose, even if that purpose chooses to take a form that appears random or purposeless. The database is therefore always and entirely implicated in the narrative of its own production and creation, in the narrative of its own purpose, whether political or aesthetic or functional or whatever, and in the narrative of what it may in fact produce in those who read it.

There is no escaping these narrative aspects of the database, and there is no separating them from the social, political, cultural, and economic implications that such narratives entail. To pass over the narrative function of the database is to impose on narrativity an artificial limit and an illusory exteriority. The only database that could actually occupy this position would be one that was neither written nor read, one that was neither populated nor empty, one that was neither ordered nor random, one that could be defined only by a language so paradoxical as to have become a theology.

I try to read promiscuously, to read attentively, to read continually.  This means, often, that the books I read in proximity to each other are not otherwise alike in any substantial way.  This is not to say that they are unrelated, but that they relate to each other differently, not just cumulatively to create a sense of an author’s corpus or a culture’s ethos, but also contrastingly to create a sense of the broader range of literary possibility.  This kind of reading functions as a sort of oppositional practice, calling into question the kinds of narrow and pseudo-scientific reading that are too often practiced by the professional readers of our culture, the professors and the critics and the theorists. This broader approach to reading permits different kinds of connections to appear, and also prevents particular kinds of connections from becoming overemphasized at the expense of others.

There is the temptation, however, when reading in this way, to impose on texts a unifying structure that they cannot actually sustain.  Even when there is no textual justification for it, there remains in the reader, or, at least, there remains in me as a reader, a strong drive to manufacture points of relationship between the books that I am reading.  It is precisely this temptation to which I found myself succumbing as I was thinking about the books that I have been reading and about the things that I would like to say about them.  So, in order to resist this tendency in me, here are some notes on what I have been reading, kept as distinct as possible and organized only in the order that I read them.  This is a false representation of my experience also, of course, but perhaps it can stand as a correction to my usual practice.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion - I was forced during my undergraduate to read another of Winterson’s novels, Sexing the Cherry, and, perhaps merely because I was forced, I did not enjoy it very much.  I appreciated the mode of humour that Winterson was employing, but it had too sharp an edge for me to laugh along with it.  I felt somehow that even Winterson was not really laughing, that she was only wielding humour as the weapon of a deeper anger or frustration.

The Passion, however, seems to employ a gentler kind of laughter, a laughter that is mixed very closely with the kind of love that has become a passion, the kind of love that needs laughter as its perspective and as its release.  Winterson says in various ways throughout the text that passion is what lies between fear and sex, and I think that the humour of the novel finds a similar place, between the wholly earnest and the wholly cynical, between the wholly naive and the wholly bawdy.  Though it has at times the same sharpness, it is not often used to wound, and the book is more subtle and more effective because of it.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall - This was my first experience of Waugh, and I found myself mostly ambivalent about it.  It is certainly very funny at times, and it is also very deft in its satire, but it lacks a sense of gravity and purpose.  Its irony falls closer to the flippancy of P. G. Wodehouse than to the commentary of Oscar Wilde, and its appeal, at least for me, suffers for it.  It is, as a confection, quite tasty, but only because it has so much sugar, and I prefer even my pastries to have a little more substance.

Malcom Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong -This book reminds me strongly of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, another story about a socially and culturally confused professor.  Bradbury’s book may suffer a little through this comparison, his characterization leaning closer to caricature than Nabokov’s, but I think that the connection is justified by the similarities in sensibility between the two books.  There is in them both a genuine sympathy for the uniquely awkward position of academics who discover themselves to be socially and morally irrelevant to the cultures around them, and this commonality interests me very much.

The role of the academic, particularly in the humanities, is a problem that is carelessly posed far more frequently than it is seriously confronted.  Academics themselves seem to take an almost perverse pride in decrying their increasing cultural irrelevance, all the while doing everything possible to ensure that this irrelevance remains entirely undisturbed.  There is, after all, no real necessity for them to be relevant, not so long as they are necessary to grant degrees, and not so long as they are content to have academic careers rather than to have educational vocations.  Those who are not content with this situation, those who feel that they should in fact be having a moral and social influence on their students and their surrounding cultures, find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Bradbury and Nabokov both explore this situation in different ways, and Bradbury’s most significant contribution is to show how academic irrelevance functions to alienate academics from themselves as well as from their social contexts.  The central character, a professor named Stuart Treece, is constantly noting how his vaguely liberal ideals are no longer capable of definition or application, and this situation is always forcing him either to act according to social norms that he does not accept or to be entirely passive.  This representation of the academic’s role is incisive, I think.  At least in my own experience, it is to one degree or another the fate of any academic who is unwilling merely to have a career but who is also unable to abandon the academic institution.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth - This was one of the many novels that I have suggested to students in my novel course without actually having read it.  It is much less and much more than I expected.  It is less as a cultural and historical depiction of pre-revolutionary China, not because it represents these things inaccurately, which I do not have the knowledge to judge in any case, but because these things are not essential to the story and are mentioned only in passing to provide a context for the story.  It is also less as a traditional novel, its characterization and its plot often feeling closer to the mode of a parable than a novel strictly speaking.  It is more, however, precisely as a kind of parable, as the stylized representation of a life that will be recognizable to anyone, despite the story’s historical and cultural remove.  It is also more as an argument for the significance of the relationship between people and the earth, affirming the goodness of being on the land and of tending the land and of making the land fruitful.

As is almost always the case, the experience of the film surprised the expectations that my reading had formed for me.  What impressed me most about the film was its attention to the everyday.  It takes for its subject the people of the city in their daily activities. but it attends to these things in ways that make them strange and beautiful and fearful and compelling.  It shows their rhythm, not only the natural rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, but the artificial rhythms and  repetitions of the worker and the machine, of the cog and the wheel and the engine and the piston.  It is this labour that the film valourizes, this repetition that is a vitality and a strength rather than a tedium.

Vertov is very concerned to show that the film and the filmmaker are also a part of this rhythmic labour and this driving vitality.  The camera or the cameraman or the editor appear in every scene, and they are always engaged in the same kinds of activity that are being filmed.  As the town wakes, the filmmaker leaves his house and leaps aboard the open car from which many of the shots are taken.  As the trolleys carry the crowds to work, the camera is riding aboard them as well, or it is placed closely among them and among the throng.  As the people begin their labour in the factories, the film stock is whirled on its spools, sliced and joined, labeled and arranged in neat rows for the eye of the editor.  As the town retires to the beach in the afternoon, the camera is shown in the water also, the cameraman bathing beside it.  The clear and insistent argument is that the camera is a significant part of the vital and productive city, that its artistic function is not distinct from the labour that drives the city and the nation.

Interestingly, this vision of the working city and of the working camera remain compelling, even if its valourization of the industrial landscape and the automated existence now seem somewhat idealistic and naive.  Despite ninety years of increasing disillusionment with the industrial enterprise, whatever its politics, the film still manages to make the worker and the factory and the worker and the machine seem things worth romanticizing. Its propagandist function remains effective even at this far a remove.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the film also.  There are some truly beautiful scenes, like the images of a sleeping woman’s arm as it lies on the coverlet, or like the flames of a foundry’s furnace that remind me of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness.  There are also some charmingly flippant moments, like the scene where the camera seems to assemble itself for an audience, or the one that captures the interaction between a couple filing divorce papers.  My version of the film also has a beautifully apt musical score composed by Michael Nyman, music that captures perfectly the rhythmic drives of the film.  All of which is to say that I should now have a better vantage from which to discuss the film the next time I teach a documentary course, and I should also have more credibility when I recommend it tp you, as I very strongly do.

This is not the first time that I have read a book into oblivion, and I always find it a singular sensation, as if I am somehow attending to a death bed, not with the intimacy of a friend or a family member, but with the distance of a priest reading the last rites, or maybe of a doctor offering palliative care. It is as if I am just coming to know these texts as they are preparing to die, as if my coming to know them is in fact an essential part of this preparation. My knowing them will only bring about their passing. When I have finished with them, they will be finished indeed. There will never be anyone who will know them again.

I recognize, of course, that these sensations fail to understand these dying texts as the reproductions that they are. I am wilfully passing over the fact that they exist in other copies and other editions and other translations and other adaptations, that their deaths are less the deaths of organisms than the deaths of singular and replaceable cells. Even so, it is only through these cells that I come to know the organisms as such. They are the places where I discover what the organisms are and what they might come to be, so it is perhaps not entirely romantic of me to feel a sense of loss as I read them, knowing that my reading will bring them to their end. The abstract texts that they represent can never care about what they were, but I will always know that it was they who took me for a friend as they lay dying.