Via Negativa

I wasn’t planning on posting anything this Memorial Day – or Decoration Day, as some people still call it – but then I saw that the discussion in the comment string to Friday’s post continues, and thought it might be appropriate to call attention to it here. My mention of burning some old journals when I was 12 or 13, and my determination never to make a similar mistake since, prompted other people to recall similar incidents. We seem to divide up into burners versus shredders.

What does it say about us, that we feel these impulses to do away with painful or embarrassing records? I would certainly not go so far as to claim that this is a peculiarly American trait – far from it. But I am reminded of our failure as a nation to admit to so many shameful chapters in our collective past. How many people are willing to acknowledge that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a terrible mistake, and that the official explanations make little sense? How many textbooks dwell on the massacre at Sand Creek, or the Bonus Army march on Washington? About the latter event, Howard Zinn writes in a People’s History of the United States:

Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House. General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the operation, Major Dwight Eisenhower his aide. George S. Patton was one of the officers. MacArthur led his troops down Pennsylvania Avenue, used tear gas to clear veterans out of the old buildings, and set the buildings on fire. Then the army moved across the bridge to Anacostia. Thousands of veterans, wives, children, began to run as the tear gas spread. The soldiers set fire to some of the huts, and soon the whole encampment was ablaze. When it was all over, two veterans had been shot to death, an eleven-week-old baby had died, an eight-year-old boy was partially blinded by gas, two police had fractured skulls, and a thousand veterans were injured by gas.

In 1996, folksinger Utah Phillips recorded an album with Rosalie Sorrels called The Long Memory. In the liner notes, he wrote:

The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.

The same year, he collaborated with Ani DiFranco (another one of my heroes) to produce The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere. In interviews with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, both singers had plenty to say about the role of artists and public performers. I think a great deal of it probably applies to bloggers, as well.

“I don’t think with either one of us it’s either/or,” says Phillips of the contrast between outward-looking and inward-looking music. “It flows back and forth as a pulse, as a sensibility. Woody Guthrie wrote, ‘When I was walking that endless highway’–there’s a lot of I in Woody. Even when he was writing about someone else, he would still transpose it into the first person, as he took these journeys into himself. I can’t fault that and say that’s primarily ego-driven. What I think you’re talking about is music which is ego-driven, what you would call journal-entry songwriting. That’s not what Ani does, the way that I hear it. I know that’s not what I do, [which is to] let people know that I’m alive and present, and this is how I’m authentically perceiving and thinking, but to expand it to the point where it can take in a lot of what other people are experiencing.”

“That whole introspective singer-songwriter thing has been kind of foisted on me,” DiFranco adds. “Some people perceive what I do in that way because I write songs through my own experience. But whenever people say, ‘Well, your work is very confessional,’ I say, ‘It’s not confessional. I’m not confessing anything. I haven’t sinned. These are not my secrets. This is just my life; this is the stuff I’ve seen, the stuff I did, and what I thought about.’ There are different ways of speaking your political perceptions, and it may be [talking about] an event that occurred in your life or an event that occurred in your town . . . but each is a valid path to a certain realization. I think that what we both do is very much about our small, little epiphanies along the way, moments of connection between things.”

This is really a more interesting question than the one I started out asking, I think: In our writing, where do we draw the line between sharing and self-indulgence? After all, what could be more self-indulgent than editing out the darkest, most uncomfortable chapters? But on the other hand, what could be more empowering that letting go of possibly unhealthy attachments to the dead hand of the past? This whole analogy between public and private histories might not be as sound as it first appears. I’ve always hated the leftist cliché that the personal is political, because I resent the implication that any one point-of-view can best describe all circumstances. And besides, life is not all about power. But we ignore at our peril the power element in all relationships – even (or especially) in our relationship with that largely unknown person we call the self.

Since the root meaning of the word “radical” is, uh, “root,” I suppose we could say that Memorial Day, with its emphasis on our rootedness in family and history, is our most radical of holidays. But roots do many more things than simply reach into the soil and hold the plant upright. The roots of most species of plants enter into symbiotic relationships with root-like fungal structures called mycelia, which encase every root hair. Not only water and nutrients, but even chemical messages pass between them, and from one plant to another through the fungal network. This network is thought to be responsible for the well-documented ability of trees to produce unpalatable tannins, for example, when neighboring trees are attacked by insects. And in an old-growth forest, tree roots become physically engrafted to each other, forming multi-species, nutrient-sharing communities whose properties and purposes remain largely unknown. In time, they may well reach a stage where cooperation becomes as significant as competition. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure.

The stalke of this Comfrey is cornered, thicke, and hollow like that of Sow-thistle: it groweth two cubits or a yard high: the leaves that spring from the root, and those that grow upon the stalkes are long, broad, rough, and pricking withall, something hairie, and being handled make the hands itch; very like in colour and roughnes to those of Borage, but longer, and sharpe pointed, as be the leaves of Elecampane: from out the wings of the stalkes appeare the floures orderly placed, long, hollow within, of a light red colour: after them groweth the seed, which is blacke. The root is long and thick, blacke without, white within, having in it a clammy juice, in which root consisteth the vertue.

Comfrey joyeth in watery ditches, in fat and fruitful medowes; they grow all in my garden.

The rootes of Comfrey stamped, and the juice drunke with wine, helpeth those that spit bloud, and healeth all inward wounds and burstings.

The same bruised and laid to in manner of a plaister, doth heale all fresh and greene woundes, and are so glutenative, that it will sodder or glew together meate that is chopt in peeces seething in a pot, and make it in one lump.

The slimie substance of the root made in a posset of ale, and given to drink against the paine in the back, gotten by any violent motion, as wrastling, or overmuch use of women, doth in foure or five daies perfectly cure the same: although the involuntary flowing of the seed in men be gotten thereby.

The rootes of Comfrey in number foure, Knotgrasse and the leaves of Clarie of each an handfull, being stamped all together, and strained, and a quart of Muscadell put thereto, the yolkes of three egges, and the powder of three Nutmegs, drunke first and last, is a most excellent medicine against a Gonorrhaea or running of the reines, and all paines and consumptions of the backe.

Moreover, it staieth the overmuch flowing of the monethly sickenesse, taken every day for certaine daies together.

It is highly commended for woundes or hurts of all the rest also of the intrailes and inward parts, and for burstings or ruptures.

The root stamped and applied unto them, taketh away the inflammation of the fundament, and overmuch flowing of the hemorrhoides.

JOHN GERARD, The Herbal or General History of Plants: The Complete 1633 Edition as Revised and Enlarged by Thomas Johnson (Dover Publications, 1975)

(For a more recent description of comfrey and its medical benefits, see Maude Grieve.)
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I blogged about Gerard’s Herbal here and here.

Friday catbird blogging

“The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. By contrast, manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. The readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author, less absent, than are the readers of those writing for print….

“Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing. Print culture of itself has a different mindset. It tends to feel a work as ‘closed’, set off from other works, a unit in itself. Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’, which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally. When in the past few decades doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract the isolationist aesthetics of a romantic pint culture, they came as a kind of shock. They were all the more disquieting because modern writers, agonizingly aware of literary history and of the de facto intertextuality of their own works, are concerned that they may be producing nothing really new or fresh at all, that they may be totally under the ‘influence’ of others’ texts. Harold Bloom’s work The Anxiety of Influence (1973) treats this modern writer’s anguish. Manuscript cultures had few if any anxieties about influence to plague them, and oral cultures had virtually none.”

– Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (Routledge, 1982)

Before the modern era, originality and creativity were no less honored, however. They just weren’t tied to a cult of the autonomous individual “closed off,” in Ong’s terminology, from the rest of society. Originality was available to any poet or author who sought inspiration at its divine source; thus, authors of new Buddhist sutras or new Biblical works could in good conscience pass them off as previously existing texts only now brought to light. Ancient origins were more prestigious because they were closer to the ultimate origin of the world. Periodic re-enactments of sacred drama and the ritual recitation of divinely inspired works – let alone the creation of new such works – enabled the experience of originary, sacred time in the present moment. As with any mind-altering substance, set and setting are absolutely crucial to the experience of a text. Without the Sabbath, for example, the Bible becomes a text like any other, a collection of hymns and stories capable of momentarily distracting the mind from its present concerns.

Can we see the common science fiction trope of time travel as a nostalgic re-invention of an ancient yearning? Sacred dramas, and the holy manuscripts that augment them, are nothing if not time machines. To a religious Jew, a Torah scroll has a metonymic relationship with the history of the Jewish people, imbuing it with potent manas. To study the Mishnah’s descriptions of temple ritual is tantamount to performing a sacrifice anew. Dialogues among scholars of these holy texts span time and space.

Originally, the text is read the way the world is read. Many if not all writing systems seem to have evolved as a way to record the results of divination, and some people still consult texts such as the Bible, the Koran or the I-Ching for divinatory purposes. Oral cultures offer plenty of parallels: the Yoruba Ifa corpus, for example, demonstrates that the use of more-or-less finished “texts” for imaginative travel into the future need not depend upon textuality per se. The important thing, as I’ve said, is the mindset one brings to the encounter with a text. If one approaches it as a knowing actor in a self-transcending drama of performance or recitation, then words can regain their power to charm, to enchant, to transport. Even in a modern, secular context, the retelling of a story in the charged, eternal present of a poem can lure a reader into empathetic participation, awakening her mind to manifold possibilities beyond those suggested by her immediate circumstances.

But stories can also serve the interests of the omnivorous distraction machine that is modern capitalism. In addition to varied embodiments of text, we must contend with the world of images, moving or stationary. Consider the difference between listening to a drama on the radio versus watching it on television: immediacy and visceral impact are purchased at the cost of imaginative re-creation. But beyond this rather commonplace observation, consider also what the Internet, and especially the blogosphere, do to the act of solitary reading. Here, too, we seem to have traded a certain degree of absorptive power for a sensation of greater immediacy, but in addition, we recover an older sense of text-as-shared-manuscript. This textual revolution will probably not survive the imminent crash of petroleum-based civilization, but something of its spirit may live on in a newly talmudic – i.e. engaged and argumentative – approach to received truths, or perhaps in a much more self-consciously intertextual and communal poetry culture in English, similar to the traditional literary cultures of Arabic or Chinese speakers.

I must confess, though: I love printed text, in part because of the very illusion of self-sufficiency and perfection that, as Ong says, it so easily projects. The book presents itself as an object to be treasured and even fetishized. But I have grown also to love the malleability and even the ephemerality of texts on the Internet. Instead of despairing at the appearance of one of my poems in print because it retains features that I may already have eliminated, it is a simple matter for me to go online and replace or augment an older version with a newer one. I can watch other poets, writers and image-makers do likewise, participating vicariously in their creative processes – though the possibility of erasure or revision of the past constitutes also one of the Internet’s greatest threats. Time machine, or machine for distraction? The Internet can be both by turns.

Blogging builds on millennia-long traditions of journal keeping and letter writing. A blog mirrors the river of time in a manner much more reminiscent of a scroll than a bound book. I have this fantasy of Via Negativa someday being copied out on a long, continuous roll of parchment or birch bark, from deer or trees that I would kill and skin with my own hands. But then, how would the links work? Maybe instead I should strive for this blog’s reproduction on some kind of metal bar or strip, which would periodically intersect with other blog/strips, the whole of it forming a vast jungle gym.

We could build a literal Internet, a scaled-down reproduction of the World-Wide Web suitable for installation in some public park or stadium. Readers would be given harnesses and climbing gear and let loose. Pigeons would strew the installation with comment spam. Hawks diving in after the pigeons would became helplessly entangled, dislocating wings, breaking their talons. Finally, someone would fall to their death, and the resulting hue and outcry would compel its removal and destruction. We’d argue for a decent burial at sea, plotting its next incarnation: sunk in shallow waters off the coast of Florida, it would become in time a new metropolis, a coral reef.

Thus, at any rate, the scenario that arises from my reading of the grounds at the bottom of my coffee mug, just now. While I was typing, a catbird landed on the stone wall outside my window and gaped at me. He was, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.