From Word To Word

The only one who can give absolutely, give truly, give without any regard to return, is the one who cannot receive, who has no need to receive, to whom receiving would add nothing. Only this giver would give essentially, would give as part of its nature. Any gift given in return to such a giver, even the gift of thanks, would be superfluous, would add nothing to the giver, would bear no essential relationship with the gift that was given. Indeed, if the giver were to receive this thanks, the receiving would only be the giving of another gift, because it would be the accepting of something that the giver did not and never would require.

The conditions last night were almost perfect for building snowmen, the ideal opportunity for my friend Dawn Matheson to conduct the inaugural operation of Project Snowman.  The target was the house of a neighbourhood woman who is fighting terminal cancer.  We assembled on her front lawn at about 8:30, armed with carrots, old clothing, and bits of asphalt gleaned from the newly paved road.  The snow was a little heavy, so we had to keep our snowmen small, but we made a dozen or so, raiding the funeral home across the street for sticks to make the arms.  The woman and her child watched us from the window, while her husband came and talked with us as we worked.

On the way home, my eldest son and I threw snowballs at every tree and telephone pole that dared to cross our path.  We arrived at the house far past the time when he should have been in bed, but we made some hot apple cider anyway. He did not get to sleep until the temperature started to drop again, freezing our snowmen into icemen on the front lawn down the block.  Good, I thought, as I got into bed myself, now they just might make it until spring.

Dave Humphrey and I have been discussing his notion of coping for some time now, even before he had settled on this particular term to describe it.  He has recently published a post that summarizes some of where this discussion has taken us, an interesting read that is particularly interesting for me in that it articulates more concisely an idea that I had previously encountered only in the context of our long, sprawling, often interrupted conversation.  It is fascinating for me to see which aspects of the conversation he includes, for example, and to recall the occasions on which some of these ideas first arose between us.

What most intrigues me in Dave’s post, however, is that he includes among his definitions of coping one that he has not yet articulated to me in person. “Coping is my existence,” he says, “when confronted by the other.”  I am arrested by this definition because it relates the idea of coping with the idea of otherness for the first time in our discussion.  Until now, Dave has defined coping almost exclusively in relation to knowledge.  Coping, in this sense, means the choice to function, not in those places where one has the illusion of sufficient knowledge, not in the place of the expert, but in the place where one is entirely without sufficient knowledge, in the place of the amateur.  It is the choice to occupy this space, not because one is forced to do so by a particular crisis, but because one values the mode of coping as such.  It is not a coping with something, even if it always appears this way.  It is coping as being.

Dave’s new definition suggests, however, that the mode of being that is coping bears a relation to the mode of being that is being confronted with the other, that these two modes are, at least in some cases, identical.  I think that this idea is profound, but I would change it somewhat in order to make clear that not all coping is encounter with the other, even if all encounter with the other is a form, perhaps the purest form, of coping.  I would say, instead, “When I am confronted by the other, my existence is coping,” and I would insist that this coping remains a function of knowledge, though in a way altogether more absolute.  Let me explain.

When I am coping in relation to an object or a situation, or even when I am coping in regard to another person in such a way that this person appears as an object rather than as the other who is confronting me, the lack of knowledge that requires me to cope is never essential or absolute.  I may not be capable of discovering this knowledge myself, of course, as with Fermat’s last theorem, or I may not be willing to do what is necessary to discover it, as with changing the oil in my car, but it will nevertheless be possible for this knowledge to be discovered.  Coping moves, therefore, from lack of knowledge to knowledge, from the amateur to the expert, and this is why the one who copes as a mode of being must constantly be going further and deeper, beyond the places where he or she has come to feel too comfortable and too masterful.

When I am confronted with the other as such, however, with the other as other, with the way that the other has encountered me, I also find myself in the mode of coping, not only for a time, but essentially and absolutely, because my knowledge of the other is and always remains profoundly lacking.  Whereas coping with a situation or an object leadd to an increased knowledge, coping with the other can only lead to a greater awareness of how fully I do not and can not know the otherness of the other.  The lack of knowledge with which my being copes remains irremediable, regardless of what I might do.  It is definitive of the encounter as such.

This is not to imply that I cannot gain knowledge of a particular person, but that this knowledge would only be of the person as object, not as other.  The othernss of the other would always escape this kind of knowledge, would always be ontologically prior to the particularity of the other that I can know and comprehend.  In every case, my lack of knowledge of the other as such would remain profound, and I would find myself capable only of coping with this lack.  My relation with the other, therefore, to the degree that it seeks to honour the other, would take the form of a continual and impossible coping, a coping for which there could be no recuperative movement toward knowledge and mastery and expertise, a coping that would always remain, purely, as coping.

A friend of mine graciously volunteered to take my eldest son to the library with her own kids this afternoon.  Since my youngest was still napping, I decided to watch Errol Morris’ Dr. Death:The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., the story of a self-taught maker of execution equipment who took samples from several of the Nazi concentration camps and testified that he could see no signs that gas was used at those facilities.

Though his report was hailed by holocaust deniers and reviled by virtually everyone else, Leuchter is not a stereotypical revisionist.  He gives the persistent impression that he still does not fully understand the magnitude of what is at stake in his findings, and he seems bewildered that people would object to his lack of experience, to his questionable sample collection methods, and to the insufficient information that was given to the lab that did the testing.  He seems half-aware of this naivete, trying to compensate for it by playing the part of the expert for the camera, a pose that makes him seem alternately pitiable and absurd.

The film as a whole has so much of Errol Morris about it that it hardly needs his name on the cover.  The editing is masterful throughout, as always, but I was particularly impressed by the use of a kind of blackout effect, where the shot of someone being interviewed momentarily goes blank while the voice continues to play over the black screen.  This technique produces an eerie sort of effect, as if the power has flickered for a moment, or as if the camera can no longer bear to look at its subject unblinkingly.  It serves as a distraction for the viewer, not away from what is being portrayed, but toward it, away from anything else.

Morris himself enters the film only once, where his offscreen voice asks Leuchter whether he has ever considered the possibility that he might be wrong.  Leuchter’s answer is less illuminating, I think, than Morris’s question.  It functions almost as the crisis of the film, as the question that necessarily haunts it from the beginning, and there is a tangible sense of catharsis when Morris finally verbalizes it in the only words that he will speak.  When Leuchter answers that he does not actually consider this possibility, not after he had reached his conclusion at the camps, it is almost irrellevent. No answer he could give would suffice in any case.  It is only necessary that the question should be asked.  This is why the film was made, and this why it should be seen.

My friend James Shelley has just posted a quotation from Ivan Illich, one of my favourite authors.  I will not try to expand upon what Illich says.  It is, just as it is, a perfect articulation of what I know to be true of friendship and of learning and of hospitality.  Coming from James, whom I do not see nearly enough, it is also a reminder of how fragile and tenuous the possibility of this friendship is, and of how much it is worth pursuing.

The accidents of naming and alphabetization have made some strange neighbours on my bookshelves.

I have often wondered what Julian Barnes and Roland Barthes have to say to one another as they are waiting to be read.  Perhaps they discuss the rhetoric of love in postmodern literature, or maybe they just make cynical jokes about poor J. M. Barrie, who happens to sit in the unfortunate place between them.

Don DeLillo might have it worse though, perched precariously between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.  Just think of the endless theorizing he must endure.  I wonder if he has anything to contribute to a debate on the nature of philosophy.  Maybe he just plugs his ears and tries to keep writing.

I imagine that Annie Dillard does a fair amount of ear plugging herself.  I have no idea how else she could sit next to the interminable Charles Dickens year after year.  No matter how much she writes, could she ever feel anything but lazy next to his incomparable production.  She probably wishes that he would just go sit beside Stephen King.  The two of them would be a match made in mass publishing heaven.

Then there is C. S. Lewis and Emmanuel Levinas.  Is a conversation between the two even imaginable, or does Levinas spend all his time looking the other way, trying to convince Claude Levi-Strauss of how problematic his essentialist anthropology really is, leaving C. S. to converse with Matthew and the other myriad Lewises.

Edmund Spencer and Art Speigelman also make an interesting pair.  I am imagining Renaissance romantic epic poetry depicted with cartoon cats and mice, or the holocaust told through the structure of a formal story cycle.  Both might have something to recommend them, but I would not look for a collaborative work any time soon, not until you can imagine a market for that sort of thing.

Nor, I think, will there be any such joint work forthcoming from Oscar Wilde and Charles Williams, though they are not perhaps so different as they might seem at first.  There is something that Williams would approve in the figure of Dorian Gray, for instance, at least to my mind, but it is probably not enough to compensate for their fundamental moral and theological differences.  Still, I would make a point of reading anything the two of them managed to create.  There would be nothing else like it in the world.

All of this makes me a little hesitant about the idea of publication, however.  What if I get set beside someone impossible?  Would I have to listen to some adjective-abusing genre novelist for all time?  Would the genre novelist have to listen to me?  I should probably check and see who my neighbours might be before I venture to send anything to a publisher.  It could save me an eternity of grief.

I have had several requests to provide a recipe for the apricot brandy with mulled cider that I have now mentioned twice.  The problem is that I rarely have recipes as such.  I have ingredients, and I have ways of preparing them, but I do not really measure anything, and I seldom make the same thing twice, so it is not always easy to describe exactly how I have made something.  Here, however, is my best approximation of a recipe, along with similar approximations for two other hot drinks that I like to make.

Mulled Apple Cider and Apricot Brandy
Pour apple cider into a pot.  Make certain that it is real apple cider, not the unreasonable facsimile of apple cider that is most often available through the supermarket.  If you can see through it, if it does not have sediment on the bottom of the bottle, if it is made any further distant than a hundred miles from you, or if it has preservatives of any kind, it is not apple cider.  Find a farmer’s market.  Find a local farmer.  Buy good cider.  It will be worth the effort.

Add cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, and roughly cracked whole nutmeg.  The fresher the spices, the better.  This means that they need to have been shipped well.  Look for a reputable dealer.  Try not to buy the little bags from the chain grocery stores.  These spices usually taste like they are older than you are.

Bring the cider to just short of a boil and simmer until the taste is as strong as you like it.  Remove it from the heat.  Add apricot brandy until it bites back a little.  I am no expert on brandies.  I just use what I find in my local liquor store.  If someone knows better, feel free to educate me.

Hot Chocolate
I include hot chocolate for the simple reason that I am so horrified by the canned stuff that I am on something of a crusade to convert people to the homemade varieties.  I am not sharing a recipe.  I am proselytizing.

Pour milk into a pot and bring it to just below a boil.  It should go without saying that it be whole milk, but I will say it anyway.  Make it organic if you can.

You have two options at this point.  Either grate unsweetened chocolate or add cocoa into the milk. In either case, make sure the chocolate is very good quality.  There are few products where there is a greater difference between high quality and low.  The milk should now be a nice brown colour and thicker in texture.  It should also taste strongly and bitterly of chocolate.

Add confectioner’s sugar to taste.  Resist the culturally inculcated tendency to add too much.  The goal is not to make it sweet.  The goal is to make it slightly less bitter.  The chocolate taste should not just predominate, it should entirely dominate.  You are making hot chocolate, not hot sugar.

Those who are a little adventurous can add crushed red chilies at this point. I think the chilies taste fabulous, but not everyone agrees with me.  Be warned.

Hot Milk Toddy
Pour milk into a pot and bring it to just below a boil, like the hot chocolate.

Add the same spices as the mulled cider and simmer.

When the spices have steeped, add rum or whiskey, whatever your preference.  It may seem a waste, but do use something reasonably good.  The rum will give a warmer, sweeter taste, the whisky a drier, sharper one.  If you are using whisky, avoid any of the seaside single malts.  The salty, medicinal taste does not mix well with the milk.  Choose something with a more balanced flavour.  I like the 15 year Dalwhinnie, but I have also used more standard selections like Glenlivet and Glenfiddich.

If you have trouble with any of the instructions, you can always come by for some personal instruction.  I will be more than happy to accommodate.

The Long Road Home is the second in a series of graphic novels that tell the story of Roland Deschain, The Gunslinger, the hero of Steven King’s Dark Tower novels.  Unfortunately, my response to it requires a little history, so bear with me.

I had never read a Steven King book that I liked until about three years ago.  The horror genre in general is entirely uninteresting to me, and I found King’s prose, which seems to value length over sound editing practise, horrific for all the wrong reasons.  I enjoyed the first part of The Stand, but it lost me in the interminable journey that comprises the middle section.  I also enjoyed King’s children’s novel, The Eyes of the Dragon, a readable and entertaining if mostly unremarkable fantasy.  I found everything else almost unreadable.

A few years ago, however, a new friend of mine recommended King’s The Dark Tower series, persistently.  He insisted that it was not a typical horror novel, not horror at all, in fact, more post-apocalyptic-western-fantasy, if I knew what he meant, which I was not sure that I did.  It is a principle of mine, however, to take serious recommendations seriously, so I sat down with the first book in the series, The Gunslinger.

The Gunslinger is a marvellous book.  The story is very simple, and this simplicity is emphasized by a prose that, by King’s standards at least, is sparse and direct.  The writing is imagistic rather than realistic, schematic rather than detailed.  It has clearly been pared and polished, worried and sifted.  It is King’s best writing by far, and its stylistic simplicity permits other forms of complexity to emerge.  The story is highly allusive to various stories and myths, particularly to Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and to the biblical account of Abraham and his son Isaac.  There is also a thematic complexity that draws from various contemporary American mythologies in ways that make the characters almost archetypal. The story and the characters seem less to tell a story than to create a myth of which they are mere instances.  They form a unique and haunting novel, and I do not think it is coincidental that, though it is one of King’s shorter novels, it took him the better part of thirteen years to complete it.

Unfortunately, the Dark Tower series does not maintain this creative level.  It is, as I always admit when I am recommending it, quite unevenly written.  While the first book has serious literary value, the second, third, and seventh are only good.  The fourth, fifth and sixth, even parts of the seventh, are not even very good, though they are still entertaining in their way.  As the series progresses, the novels get steadily longer and less precise, steadily more like the writing of the generic horror novels that King produces at such an alarming rate.  Though they are still good stories, and though they are still quite imaginative, they lack what thirteen odd years of polish and revision brought to the first text.

The fourth, Wizard and Glass, is probably the low point of the series.  Not only is it too long and too ungainly, but it is comprised of a single long flashback episode to Rowland’s youth, an episode that certainly provides some context for Rowland’s character as an older man, but that nevertheless feels entirely out of place in the larger sequence of novels.  The whole book is a frustrating disruption to the larger narrative, to the point where I skipped it entirely when I went to reread the series this past year.  I have even suggested this approach to others when I have recommended the series to them, explaining that only the beginning and ending of this book are really necessary to the story, and that it is perhaps better read later as a separate novel.

This is why I was disappointed when the first graphic novel, The Gunslinger Born, began the story with the events of the fourth novel.  Assuming that the writers intended to produce graphic novel versions of the whole Dark Tower series, I felt that they had done the series a disservice by not beginning with the book that made it worth reading in the first place.  I understood the logic that would put the books in chronological order, but I thought this logic grossly insufficient to warrant beginning the narrative with anything other than the figure of Rowland walking across the desert in pursuit of the dark man.

All of this is to explain why I was pleasantly surprised by the second graphic novel in the series.  It does not, as I assumed it would, return to the first of King’s novels, but relates the previously untold story that spans the time between the events of the fourth novel and those of the first.  Not only does this project explain much more satisfactorily why the first graphic novel began where it did, but it means that the rest of the original novels will probably not be rendered in graphic novel form, an undertaking that I always thought a bit suspicious.  Rather than attempting to produce what could only be inferior versions of the original novels, the graphic novel series instead expands on the very minimal information that King includes about the young Rowland to produce entirely new episodes. I am much more satisfied with this approach, and it makes the new graphic novel much more worth reading.

I held a miniature Pare Lorentz film festival this past weekend for those of us who were gathered at my Mother’s place on Manitoulin Island.  On Friday night, while drinking the previously mentioned concoction of mulled apple cider and apricot brandy, we watched The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936).  Saturday night, while drinking a beautiful 18 year old scotch, we watched The River (1938).  Both films are on a 2007 Naxos DVD release that includes a new recording of the original Virgil Thompson scores.

Having read about both films for my teaching, I came to them with an intellectual awareness of their significance to the development of both documentary film and orchestral music in the United States.  Both works were commissioned by the departments of the United States government in support of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and both faced significant opposition because of this propagandist element in their creation.  Nevertheless, both were also fairly well received by audiences and by critics, receiving several awards, not just for their value as documentaries, but also for their musical scores and for their free-verse scripts.  They introduced several innovative elements in all of these areas, influencing people as diverse as composer Aaron Copeland and novelist John Steinbeck.

Ironically, considering the purpose for which they were commissioned and the reasons for which they were controversial, neither film would appear terribly propagandistic to current viewers.  While they are certainly critical of past farming and settlement practices, and while The River also advocates for an approach to these issues that accords with New Deal policies, there are no explicit political references of any kind in either film.  Both seem far more preoccupied with the land and the river themselves, as natural elements that have been destroyed by the practises of the settlers.  Their argument seems far more environmental then political, even if the politics of this environmentalism can never be ignored.  They lack the kind of visual rhetoric that usually characterizes propaganda films, like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), for example, which was released just before The River, or like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1943-1945), which would be the United States’ next serious foray into producing propaganda films.  There are certainly some scenes in The Plow that Broke The Plains that are evocative of Riefenstahl, intercutting images of tanks and tractors along with scenes of people cheering soldiers as they parade, but the narration ironizes these scenes even as they aey are being played, and the narrative of the film soon does the same, as the tractors are next shown broken and half-covered in drifting sand.

This collection of facts about the films does not, of course, convey a real sense of the vision that Lorentz expresses through them.  What is most remarkable about them is the way that the cinematography and the music and the poetry come together to form a unified whole.  There is in The Plow that Broke the Plains, for example, a beautiful shot of a train running along the very bottom of the screen, its plume of smoke rising to parallel the clouds that dominate the rest of shot.  These kinds of images are overlayed by Thompson’s simple, emotional score and by the narrative that repeats throughout the film, “High winds and sun, high winds and sun, a country without rivers, without streams, and with little rain,” combining to create an argument that is less comprehended than experienced.

These combinatory effects are the strength of the films, what allows them to transcend the merely propoganstic purposes for which they were funded and to remain appealing long after those purposes have become obsolete.  They permit the films, not to ignore the politics that commissioned them, but to be more or less unconcerned with them.  They do not try to escape the political necessities that give them their context.  They merely show that they have other concerns as well, other concerns that are perhaps more significant, concerns with an aesthetics and an ethics that the political is unable or unwilling to comprehend.  This is why, eighty years later, they remain compelling, because their ethics and their aesthetics have remained relevant, even if their politics have not.

There are times that I feel acutely the lack of something for the simple reason that I am lacking so little else.

I am currently at my Mother’s place on Manitoulin Island.  I have had for dinner a very nice roast beef and several bottles of very nice wine.  I have had a bonfire with my eldest son, where I toasted marshmallows that he smeared all over his gloves.  Now that he is asleep, I am drinking hot, mulled apple cider that has been cut amply with apricot brandy, and I am settling into the silence.

I want my pipe.