Month: April 2014

Morgan Meis ponders it after viewing Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy, which follows an estranged couple through the ruins of Pompeii:

The real journey in Journey to Italy is a journey toward death. Ingrid Bergman’s character is confronted by death as soon as she comes to Italy. Death comes toward her from afar. First, death comes in the form of ancient statues in the museum. Then it comes in the form of a funeral procession that passes in front of her car. Death comes again in the form of the cult of death, and the people who live among the skulls and skeletons of the dead at Fontanelle Cemetery. Finally, death comes out of the ground, in the penultimate scene of the movie, as the calchi [plaster casts].

After Bergman’s character and her husband see the calchi, something unexpected happens.

The estranged lovers are able to see one another again. Their eyes are opened. Death, in the final scene of the movie, is transformed into love. This is not a romantic love. It isn’t born of passion or high feelings. It is a love between two people who have come to hate one another, and who have shared a shocking encounter with death.

The implication of the final scenes of Journey to Italy is, therefore, that genuine love has something to do with death or that death makes it possible. Love, in Journey to Italy, does not happen because two people are attracted to one another or find they have similar interests. Love happens because two people who are already married, and antagonistic toward one another, confront the full reality of death. Death opens the door to love. The calchi open the door to love. There is something, Roberto Rossellini suggests with his movie, about confronting the immediacy of death that makes a person, paradoxically, more alive. The person who is shocked into life by death is capable of love, since love, as Rossellini portrays it, is not a feeling so much as a commitment, a commitment to another human being made under the eyes of death. The calchi, surprisingly and finally, are not only emblems of death; they are the promise of love.

Meis’ passage brings to mind the following song from the Mountain Goats, from the album Tallahassee, themed around a despondent, alcoholic couple on the brink of divorce:

The Dish aired arguments about the question here and here. Chad Wellmon deepens the debate, arguing that our discomfort with the digital humanities stems from literature having taken on an almost religious quality: “After the death of God, literature is a resource for self-transformation, and reading–closely, caringly, silently–is one of our modern liturgies.” But it wasn’t always this way:

Until the end of the eighteenth century, literature referred to everything that had been printed. It wasn’t until around 1800 that it was used to refer to a particular kind of writing. Only when there was too much literature did Literature become a distinct category. In 1803 Wilhelm Schlegel, a German Romantic and one of the first scholars of Literature, lamented the pitiful state of German reading and writing. Given the ready availability of printed texts, German readers no longer read with “devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction.” To remedy this situation he invoked Literature as a particular kind of writing that had been filtered and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. What was needed to remedy the sorry condition of German literature and thought more generally, claimed Schlegel, was a normative, critical category that would separate the good books from the bad ones and help readers make their way through the proliferation of print. Literature was not simply a “raw aggregate of books”; it was a source of spiritual relief and discovery.

For some, the digital humanities threatens to interrupt this experience of Literature by reducing texts to an aggregation of data points.

These contemporary cultural anxieties echo similar anxieties that accompanied the desacralizaiton of other kinds of texts. Consider the double bind of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century British scholars of the Bible. With the profusion of apocryphal material and new scholarly methods, they pioneered forms of inquiry that many worried would undermine the divine authority of the Bible. The enumeration of 30,000 variants among various Biblical manuscripts by the Oxford scholar John Mill, claimed some, made the Bible seem all too human. Something similar happened when eighteen-century German philologists like Friedrich A. Wolf, flush with newly discovered information and refined techniques of philological criticism, suggested that the Odyssey was not the result of one author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—just as biblical scholars had eventually concluded about the Old Testament. Similar to biblical scholars, Wolf thought that he faced a choice: he could either save Homer as creator and obliterate the text or save the text and destroy the author—a figure who had become a model for humanist education.

Richard Beck argues that cultivating friendships, especially across class boundaries, might be “the most important thing the church can to do help lift people out of poverty”:

[W]hat I find lacking in many churches is friendship, a face-to-face, first-name-basis relationality between rich and poor. This is what is missing in many churches. Programs abound but there is too little friendship.

And in many ways this call for friendship is both harder and easier than starting up a poverty program at the church. It’s easier in that you don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to eradicate world poverty. You just have to be a friend.

To be sure, you’ll be faced with issues regarding material want. But the needs of your friends will be expressed within a relational context. And because of the friendship you’ll be able to discern the legitimacy of the requests and, given your knowledge of your friend, how best to respond. And most importantly, the situation will be reciprocal. Your friend will be giving to you as well. Perhaps not materially, but there will be life-giving exchanges flowing back and forth.

So in many ways, being a friend is much easier than trying to save the world. And yet, it’s also much harder. Your life will get messier. You’ll have to struggle with how best to help your friend and those decisions can be heart-breaking at times. Volunteering a few hours at the food pantry or sponsoring a child in Africa is a whole lot easier and cleaner than making friends and opening up your life to the needs, demands and sin of others. To say nothing of how your needs, wants and sins will affect them.

Gracy Olmstead explains one facet of Beck’s argument – the way “weak ties” help us meet the various needs of those struggling:

Beck emphasizes the fact that “weak ties” in friendship are very needed. Why? Because our closest friends are usually insular groups, “bundles of sameness.” Weak ties—distant relatives, acquaintances from our neighborhood or past—are usually more diverse in their background, tastes, and employment. This wider “social web” gives us philanthropic ammunition: when you see someone in need, you don’t just bring your own talents and gifts to the table. You bring everyone you’ve ever met—”Bluntly, you might not be able to help this person in a particular situation but you might know someone else who can. In sacramental friendships you are bringing the gift of your weak ties.” …

Beck’s friendships of “weak ties” provide a hidden and important ingredient in the inequality discussion. Friendship is a diverse and beautiful thing—it’s a proactive, personal, and private solvent to a very large and public problem. It deals with the dilemma on a case-by-case basis. It reaches out via the various spheres and circles open to the people in question. Granted, it’s not a solid, comprehensive, quantifiable solution to inequality. But it is an important, and oft-ignored, piece in the giant solution puzzle.

Recent Dish on friendship here.

Stefan Kanfer’s tribute to Maurice Sendak underlines how the late writer-illustrator’s “favorite pose of curmudgeon” concealed a profound sensitivity:

Sendak became increasingly Sendakian in his last years. A triple bypass left him diminished, but not too weak to roar. Stocky, bearded, and glowering, the Connecticut Tevye railed against the excesses of technology, sentimentality, and commercialism.

Last summer, New York’s Society of Illustrators paid homage to one of its greatest members with an exhibition that covered two floors. In addition to scores of Sendak’s sketches and finished artwork, the show included videotapes of his final interviews, most of them theatrically grumpy. Asked about e-books, he snapped, “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book.” As for posthumous tributes, he wanted “no statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up on me, à la Hans Christian Andersen. I won’t have it.” When comedian Stephen Colbert asked him, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?,” Sendak was ready: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.”

But these fulminations didn’t deceive the people who understood him. We knew that Sendak needed his hard carapace to cover a psyche as sensitive as a light meter. Without it, he would never have survived, let alone triumphed. We also knew that toward the end, he made his peace with life—and with death. Shortly before he suffered a fatal stroke in 2012, he looked back in unaccustomed tranquillity: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready.”

Previous Dish on Sendak here, here, and here.

(Video: An animated clip of Sendak’s notably un-grumpy final interview with Terry Gross in 2011)

Noah Gittell notices that a “new series of pop culture protagonists are not fighting the end of the world; they’re welcoming it”:

Take Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which is at once an epic disaster movie and a penetrating exploration of the misanthropy that underpins the genre. How else to describe films that wring entertainment from the potential end of humanity? As played by Russell Crowe, Noah has a deep, simmering hatred for man even before God asks for his help. Civilization is ruled by rape and savagery; Noah, meanwhile, teaches his children to respect even the smallest flower.

Most disaster movies would end when the great flood comes and our hero saves his family. Noah lets the story continue and takes misanthropy to its logical endpoint. Once aboard the ark, Noah receives another message from God telling him that mankind is to end his with his family. Since his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson) is pregnant, Noah pledges to murder his infant grandchild, if she is born a girl, i.e. with the capability of repopulating the planet with humans. Mankind, we are told, is a failed experiment, a harsh assertion for a Hollywood movie.

David Sessions finds that such misanthropy isn’t reserved for Noah; his first response to the movie was, “I think the moral of the story was that God is evil”:

It’s not very clear here what the sins are, but we know that man is accused of a) multiplying and b) being violent. But as Noah’s family quickly finds out, they’re just as violent as everyone else. After watching the shocking goings-on at a nearby camp of Canaanites, Noah realizes he and his wife would kill them in a heartbeat to protect their children. Near the end of the ark ride, he’s become a raving madman chasing two newborn babies with a knife, and his two oldest sons are prepared to bring him to what would appear to be a very righteous end. (They kill Tubal-Cain instead, and after a dramatic knife-raise, Noah leaves the babies in peace.) Even if most of this isn’t in the Bible, we know that the reboot of humankind produced even greater achievements in multiplication and mass murder. So God killed millions of people because they were violent, and then saved enough of them that they could return to exactly that state? It’s not surprising that Aronofsky’s Noah comes to believe that humans are supposed to die out in the new world. Either he kills those babies, or God is cruel and insane.

And speaking of the end of the world, Joel S. Baden questions the way the film’s environmentalist message fits with the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis, arguing that of “all the stories in the Bible, the flood narrative is perhaps the least environmentally friendly”:

In the end, the deluge does nothing to wipe out the violence and wickedness that brought it about in the first place. It is God who changes, accepting that the human race is inherently superior to mere animals, and bloodthirsty at that: “Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat,” he says after the waters have cleared. “The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.”

In fact, in the Bible, the motivation for God’s promise never to bring another flood is Noah’s sacrifice of some of the animals he brought with him on the ark. (The Bible tells us that Noah brought not only two of each animal, but seven pairs of the clean — that is, sacrificable —animals.) It is the smell of burning animal flesh that reminds God that humanity is worth saving: No other species cooks for him. That aspect of the biblical account is nowhere to be found in the film. There is no sacrifice at the end of the movie.

Though humanity makes no promise of better stewardship in the Bible, God makes a unilateral promise never to destroy the Earth again, no strings attached. Whatever we may do, however evil we may be, however much we destroy the planet, we need not fear wholesale natural destruction, says Genesis, in what can only be seen as the antithesis of the environmentalist message.

Previous Dish on the film here.

Douthat recently addressed (NYT) an oft-invoked paradox of American life – that social scientists associate religious faith with a number of social goods, from personal well-being to participation in civic life, while areas like the Bible Belt suffer from more than their fair share of social ills, like out-of-wedlock births and poverty. How to explain this? He argues that the “social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief,” and that such mere affiliation or nominal belief – the “Christian penumbra” – could be the problem:

In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.

And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.

Seeing some of the problems in our culture through this lens might be useful for the religious and secular alike. For nonbelievers inclined to look down on the alleged backwardness of the Bible Belt, it would be helpful to recognize that at least some the problems they see at work reflect traditional religion’s growing weakness rather than its potency.

Paul Elie isn’t so sure:

What to make of this?  Well, my first instinct is to challenge the social science: for one thing, its categories are usually vague to the point of imprecision, and for another, the strong religion Douthat is drawn to has as one of its core beliefs the conviction that social goods can’t be understood (or fostered) in a general sense, social science-style — can’t be understood apart from particular traditions with specific conceptions of the good, conceptions that are meant to challenge our common-sense, social-science-y ideas of what social goods are. …

[W]hat’s easy to miss is the (seemingly) obvious point that the most powerful and effective way to promote a social good is personally, not culturally – for individuals or communities to reach out to those in their midst who are in need and try to hear them, and help them.  Call this virtue, or kindness, or charity, or love – but this, and not promoting social goods as a means toward the maintenance of the community and the strengthening of its position in an “ideological battle,” is the heart of the matter, isn’t it?

Also responding to Douthat, Dreher indicts his generation for failing to pass on their faith, creating “the murky space where many, many Americans dwell: between unbelief in Christianity and committed belief in Christianity”:

My fear — and it is that: a fear — is that so many of us older believers are making it difficult to impossible for our children to believe, simply by failing to teach them the basics of the faith, and to demonstrate by our lives that these things we believe are true.

It is the case that not everyone in ages past knew much theology, or even cared to know. But I believe it was the case back then that the faith was nearer to hand than it is today, for those who cared to embrace it. This no doubt led to Christianity as little more than middle-class respectability; this, in fact, is what Kierkegaard railed against in 19th-century Copenhagen: the reduction of the radicalism of the Christian faith to bourgeois ideology. Maybe the times we’re in now require those who profess Christianity, in all its forms, to embrace its core radicalism more consciously. Yes, this must be true: Christians have to push back against the world as hard as the world pushes against them. The lukewarm and their descendants will be seduced by the siren song of individualism, shoved over the cliff and washed down the river by the irresistible current. What a terrible judgment to inflict upon one’s children. I’ll be crude here, but the seriousness of the situation demands straight talk: you are a Christian, but half-assed about it, you had better face the likelihood that your children and your grandchildren will be strangers to the faith.