Waves Of Grief

Andrea Woodhouse, who was in Indonesia when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit a decade ago, reflects on the connection between grief and catastrophe:

In her book Upheavals of Thought, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that emotion is bound up with intelligence: it is not opposed to rationality but rather at its center. Feelings such as love and sorrow are finely tuned responses to judgments about what is true and valuable in the world. As such, our beliefs about the outer world can condition the experience of the inner: they affect not only the way we behave, but how we feel. If I believe in God and an afterlife, for example, I might feel grief differently from someone who does not. The name we give our emotion will be the same, but my grief may contain some hope.

I wondered if this might be true too about grief in the face of catastrophe. Was it that in the face of social expectation people in [the province of] Aceh sought to overcome emotion and control how they behaved? Or did catastrophe overturn something about the emotion itself? I wondered if the vast weight of the tsunami made small the space for grieving. It was as if each person’s grief took the measure of itself and shrank to fit the space left over by the sorrow of others. And so the human spirit flourished instead, and in this there lived a kind of beauty.

“An American Orwell”

In a review of Irving Howe’s recently-published collected essays, A Voice Still Heard, Frank Foer appends that label to the critic and longtime editor of Dissent. Foer goes on to assert that Howe was “our most thrilling dissident, a socialist with conservative cultural sympathies, a scything polemicist capable of the most tender, patient literary explication”:

Irving_Howe_(1968)Howe had a heroic conception of the intellectual, and from an early age, he thrust himself into the growing world of little magazines. In his 20s, after his discharge from the Army, he worked as an intern, to use an anachronistic term, for Dwight Macdonald and Hannah Arendt. Both of these early patrons came to somewhat annoy him, but he paid close attention to their methods. Even as he became one of the greatest practicing critics in the country, he was also the sharpest, most observant student of his fellow intellectuals. They were truly his great subject. … Howe wrote about other writers with anthropological detachment, followed by blazing expressions of his disappointment with them. Namely, he flayed them for failing to do the most elemental part of their job, holding society to account.

David Marcus examines the way Howe “considered his literary and political inclinations to be one in the same, two sides—utopian and ironic, committed and critical—of the same intellectual vocation”:

[Lionel] Trilling remarked in this period that this choice between commitment and literary complexity was a “dark and bloody crossroads.” For Howe it was precisely by remaining between politics and literature that one became an intellectual.

Trilling insisted on the “moral obligation to be intelligent”; Howe insisted there was a moral obligation to apply such intelligence to politics. To rub social needs against utopian desires, the demand for political action against the supple ambiguities of the literary imagination—this was the task of the intellectual; its friction generated sparks.

This was not a new position. Figures like Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson also articulated such a vision in the 1930s and ’40s: that radicalism was a total stance, political and literary, engaged with discovering not only new images of the world but new social structures. As the French Surrealist, Andre Breton, put it in an address around this time: “‘Transform the world,’ said Marx. ‘Change life,’ said Rimbaud. These two are … one and the same.” But for many intellectuals in the early 1950s it was beginning to appear as if they should not be one and the same. Marx and Rimbaud, Trotsky and Proust, the rigors of politics and the spirited sense of possibility in literature—these were increasingly seen as separate fields of intellectual activity.

To sample Howe’s writing, check out this famous 1969 essay of his, “The New York Intellectuals.”

(A photo of Howe at the University of Michigan in 1967, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Still, Small Voice Of Contemporary Catholic Fiction

In an interview that circles back to the debate on faith and fiction the Dish has covered extensively over the past two years, Gregory Wolfe defends the way contemporary Catholic novelists approach their work:

The mid-twentieth century Catholic writers tended to “shout” rather than “whisper” for several reasons. For one thing, Modernism in literature loved the big gesture. For another, it was an era when the newly ascendant “master narratives” of modernity—Marxism and Freudianism among them—were clashing with the Judeo-Christian narrative in an intense way. Add to this that for the Catholic writer of the time the Church seemed adamantine (no shadows of dissent), a “sign of contradiction” against modernity itself.

Now flash forward to our own time. Postmodernism questions any and all master narratives, favoring smaller-scale, intimate stories over epics and dramas. Secularism, pluralism, and hedonism have brought about a huge loss of trust in authority, not to mention the authority of the Catholic Church (and that includes its adherents). People have lost touch with the teachings and traditions of their faith. Many people are really starting from scratch.

What kind of fiction would someone write out of this experience of reality? Novels about heroic martyrs to Communist totalitarianism? No, they would be writing out of this confused culture—one where God is discerned only in the still small voice: the whisper, not the shout.

Remembering Father Louis

Father Louis, of course, was Thomas Merton, who was born 100 years ago this month. Carol Zaleski looks back at his complex life and faith:

[H]ow inscrutable you were, for all the self-revealing writing. You wrote a memoir worthy of comparison to Augustine’s Confessions—were it not marred by a Holden Caulfield–like contemptus mundi. You tapped into the wellsprings of monastic spirituality through scholarship and reflection on the Rule of St. Benedict, the Desert Fathers, John Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux—and then you translated that spirituality into an idiom of authenticity and alienation that now seems dated. You restored contemplation to its rightful centrality in Christian life and did much “to reassure the modern world that in the struggle between thought and existence we [monks] are on the side of existence, not on the side of abstraction”—and then you portrayed contemplation as so radically self-emptying that it sheds much of its specific religious content. You fought for the privilege of living as a hermit on the abbey grounds—but you let your hermitage become a gathering place for your nonmonastic friends during a period when you were (as you told Rosemary Radford Ruether) “browned off with and afraid of Catholics.”

On a reductionist psychoanalytic reading, you were an orphan searching for his lost parents, a repressed lover, and a narcissist drowning in his own reflection. On a more discerning Augustinian reading, though, you were an Everyman whose heart is restless until it rests in God; and on a sound monastic reading, you were one of thousands of essentially good monks who strayed but stayed the course. I believe you did stay the course. Had it not been for the faulty electric fan, or the fault in your own heart, I believe you would have returned to Gethsemani to be a model of monastic wisdom after the storms of youth had passed.

Quote For The Day

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture,” – Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.

Priceless Particles

dish_stardust

For her project Stardust, Corinne Schulze photographed the “the bits and pieces of archaeological artifacts” she discovered while working with historical treasures at a New York museum:

One day, Schulze looked down at her studio sweep and those tiny pieces of dust and debris left behind struck her differently. Rather than unfortunate casualties of the job, the debris looked to her like celestial formations. She transferred it to a black background—like the vast canvas of space—and snapped a photo.

“It reminded me of the idea that we’re all made of stardust—Carl Sagan and all that stuff,” she said.

Most of the objects she shot were gathered in the early 20th century, when the collection process was far less careful than it is today. Archaeologists shoveled up the objects, dumped them in a box along with whatever dirt and fragments surrounded it, and closed them up with notes about what was found that still left much to the imagination.

See more of Schulze’s work here.

How To Flirt On The Internet

According to Emily Witt, who investigated the live webcam site Chaturbate, it helps if you’re a woman:

At first I avoided the most sexually explicit channels. I preferred to watch women, but not usually at their most pornographic. I watched when they were just doing things, chatting or cutting out paper hearts for Valentine’s Day or listening to the songs of Miley Cyrus. I watched the women because they were more interesting than the men, who invariably positioned themselves in a black computer chair at a desk in ghastly desk-lamp illumination, dick in hand, making the usual motions, unless they reclined in bed and did the same, with little in the way of creativity or gimmicks. It was amazing the diversity of what men wanted performed for them and how little they offered to others, except for a few of the gay guys, who seemed to understand that some form of flirtation might exhilarate the spirit and therefore did yoga routines in bike shorts or lip-synched to pop hits.

Witt goes on to consider whether “internet sexual” qualifies as a new orientation. She talks to Chaturbate performers Max and Harper – whose webcam performances have included a penis-in-ice-water endurance test as well as “puppet shows, and threesomes, and a food fight” – about how their ideas of sex have changed:

As Max and Harper have gone deeper into their online sexual exploration, they have learned that sex is no longer a thing either of them could define. “I know intercourse is definable as a thing but I don’t, like, believe in ‘sex’,” said Max. “I don’t think I could point to it, I couldn’t tell you what it is, because for some people, completely-clothed-just-pulling-at-your-nostrils-at-a-camera is sex, it’s a massive turn-on.”

Some people might look at Max and Harper, or anybody on Chaturbate, and disagree. They might think of clean sheets, a well-made bed, a clearly defined “partner,” and a closed door and think that they know exactly what sex is — loving, maybe; monogamous, probably; dignified by its secrecy; more authentic for not being shared; sacred because it’s not mediated through a cell phone. Spend enough time on Chaturbate and such a view starts to feel both rarified and unambitious. …

Right now I see being sexual on the internet as a bold and risky form of performance. I anticipate that in the future it will just be thought of as sex.

Hathos For Herzog

Werner Herzog narrates one of Klaus Kinski’s outbursts on the set of Fitzcarraldo (language is NSFW, especially for German speakers):

Kinski appears to have experienced the “compulsion of revulsion” for the director. Charlie McCann, who recently saw Herzog speak at the New York Public Library, elaborates:

At one point [event director Paul] Holdengräber read a particularly vivid passage from an autobiography by Klaus Kinski, the mercurial actor who starred in several of Herzog’s films:

“He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! The sting of a deadly spider should paralyse him! His brain should burst from the bite of the most poisonous of all snakes! Panthers shouldn’t slit his throat open with their claws, that would be too good for him! No. Big red ants should piss in his eyes, eat his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts! He should get the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! In vain. The more I wish the most horrible of deaths on him and treat him like the scum of the earth that he is, the less I can get rid of him!”

Herzog’s reply? “It’s good prose.”

He wasn’t just being game. When Kinski was writing this invective, he came to Herzog for assistance. Herzog pulled out his pocket OED and together they looked for choice metaphors and better epithets. It turns out even his sworn enemies come to Herzog for guidance.

Conflict Cuisine

Lionel Beehner considers a correlation:

In my past life as a freelance reporter based in post-conflict countries, I used to think there was a direct relationship between war-torn places and good cuisine. Maybe an inventive menu was a sign of ethnically diverse cultures, which may be synonymous with internecine conflict. Conflict zones, after all, tend to bestride former empires. Or perhaps the horror of war is what lends itself to good food – as a form of culinary escapism.

The tastiest kebabs I’ve tried are in Aleppo (in a former merchant guesthouse since leveled during the war). Which should come as no surprise: Syria sits at a cultural crossroads — its cuisine benefits from Ottoman, Armenian, Jewish, and French influences. That would also explain why the best falafel in Jordan, at least according to aid workers there, is in a Syrian refugee camp. I remember sampling the best cheese and wine I’d ever tried in Tbilisi shortly after Georgia’s 2008 war with Russia. That makes sense – Georgia has been invaded by the Mongols, the Persians, the Turks.

Blander food conversely seems to go hand in hand with peace and stability. Until Rene Redzepi’s Noma lit up the latest New Nordic foodie craze, peace in northern Europe corresponded with a dull and unpredictable diet of meat and potatoes. The Balkans may be a less stable place, but anybody who’s tried a cevapi in Sarajevo can say that Bosnian cuisine is anything but bland. I have fond memories of my trip last year to Tanzania – a country at relative peace since a border scuffle with Burundi in 1996 – but tasting its native cuisine was not one of them. Ethiopia, which has seen no shortage of war and conflict, boasts perhaps the continent’s best food.