charlotte-street

Charlotte St., Exit

2007-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

2007-09-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

Catholic Herald

2007-09-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

Mildly intrigued by a visit here from the Vatican:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kafka sunday never ends&btnG=Google Search

Holy See (vatican City State)
Region
Holy See (vatican City)
City
Vatican
ISP
Holy See - Vatican City State

This made me think of a brief stint I did at the Catholic Herald. One week i wrote a ficticious piece, under the daft name Fingal Mackeen about my (non-existent) Catholic childhood, evoking the smell of beeswax and other objects of nostalgia. I felt slightly guilty when someone wrote to the paper saying how moved they were by the article, how it reminded them of their own childhood.

(Not) speaking to the congregation

2007-08-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

The post below comprises some notes on a poem by Yeats. It is part of something I am writing on the poet. These notes will interest perhaps only one or two readers. For the majority of you, who can’t be bothered reading the whole thing, any thoughts on chanting (historical / theoretical) and the differences between chanting and singing would be welcome.

To the Rose Upon the Rood of time

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more bear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days

So firstly, what is the relation between the ‘chaunt’ of the second stanza and ‘sing’ of the first? The poet invokes the Rose as muse in order to ‘sing’, to articulate in song, a certain tradition. But the Rose’s ‘overproximity’, at once conjured and feared, would draw him towards the obscure language of the Dead and to the chant rather than the song. We need, then, to interpret this counterpoint of song and chant – or ‘chaunt’, for the archaism needs also to be read.

If we consider the etymology of chant, it is frequently used, or was, as a description of the non-human voice: birds and even hounds ‘chaunt’[1]. Yeats may have wanted this suggestion of some inhuman or chthonic noise, an accent from some language before language. And the archaic spelling may return this older sense. (‘Sing’, certainly, is something birds do, but not other animals, and in any case it perhaps connotes pastoral harmonies that the poet wants to exclude.)

‘Song,’ of course, is associated also with expression; to sing is to utter or vocalise – a conscious articulation. Chaunt is something altogether more incantatory, mantric, rote-like. There is something properly mindless about chanting, hence its use in religion, ritual and magic – one cedes the initiative to a word or formula not yours. The momentum of the chant seems to overtake and then take in the individuals who began it. So too does the chant reverse the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ implied in ‘expression’. That is, whereas ‘expression’ is conceived as the inner made outer, something like a chant begins by emptying out the ‘wilfulness’ of expression in deference to some older word or doctrine. Yeats’s phrase here might be apposite: “a monotony in external things for the sake of in interior variety”. In liturgical practice, chanting allows the Word to speak rather than the congregation. In Yeats’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’, the ‘resonant chanting voice,’ that of an ancient wisdom, speaks through the mouth of the old man (himself elsewhere in dreamland). In bardic poetry, tradition itself speaks, and it is this association that Yeats seems to associate with chanting:

“Tales of the kind that are told generation after generation in the same words and in the same chanting voice.”[2]

“night after night in winter, Gaelic storytellers would chant old poems to them over the poteen”[3].

Chanting is clearly linked to enchantment. In another early Yeats story, (‘The Binding of the Hair’), Yeats refers to the ‘chaunt’ of “bard Aodh” and the “enchantment of his dream-heavy voice” – poetry is here tied to song and is a matter of incantations and spells as opposed to ‘expression’. As such the chant is from the prehistory of art - it is bound up with tradition. Indeed, if tradition is that wherein the Dead continue to live, then Yeats’s phrase ‘bright hearts of those long dead’ seems to encapsulate this. It is through the ‘medium’ of tradition that the Dead are animate.

But the ‘unknown tongue’ adds a further emphasis. If, in chanting, the “I” is speechless, the image of chanting an unknown or foreign tongue is of words learned as mere rhythm and sound prior to sense, of the self subdued or bound by the spell of some uncanny incantation. Again, at the close of ‘Adoration of the Magi’ the narrator ‘repeats’ rather than utters a Gaelic prayer – a ‘foreign tongue’ - as a chant to hold the daemonic at bay.

Worth noting here is that the other ‘unknown tongue’ in the early poetry belongs to a demon in WOO:

“.. beyond the door a plain,/ Dusky and herbless, where a bubbling strain/ Rose from a little runnel on whose edge/ A dusk demon, dry as withered sedge,/ Swayed ,crooning to himself in an unknown tongue.”[4]

This daemonic figure rises ‘barking’ from an earth of which he seems the very likeness or echo (dusk/ dusky), a chthonic inhuman creature of the island, the ‘mournful’ emanation of an equally mournful landscape, engaged in who knows not what obscure jouissance.[5] Again, the ‘unknown tongue’ is here an sign of some language older than language, or ‘canticle of the earth’.

But the phrase ‘unknown tongue’ has biblical precedent too. In a phrase very close to what Yeats says, we find __ “He who speaks in an unknown tongue speaks not to the congregation but to god”. Note that ‘unknown’ here means unknown to the person actually speaking the words. We are dealing, that is, with glossolalia.

Secondly, in speaking in an unknown tongue, the ‘spirit still prays’ even where the understanding doesn’t follow What this suggests is that the words, like the Tibetan prayer wheel, have an autonomous force over and beyond the individual. The words do the praying for you.

The poem’s contrast, then, is between a subject summoning, or beckoning a muse so as to be able to sing, and the prospect of some subjectless chant of tradition, some inscrutable ancestral idiom which might cancel the space necessary for the poet to draw breath. The poet needs to be able to summon or cite tradition and the ancestral, without thereby being taken at his word.

But the ‘chanting’ of the Gaelic prayer at the end of Adoration of the Magi reminds us also of the peculiar nature of the language issue in Ireland, and the way in which the ‘singing’ of tradition would at some point have to translate back into the ‘unknown’ Gaelic register from which it draws validity, the 'lost' language of tradition, native but foreign to that middle-class ‘congregation’ to whom Yeats must speak. And there is, again, a rather literal sense in which the past is padlocked inside a ‘tongue men do not know’, a temporal safe-deposit box which he lacks the power to open and which, therefore, can only leave him sick with longing.

[1] The relevant definitions from the OED are as follows:

intr. To sing, warble.arch. or poet. b. of birds. c. transf. of other animals; spec. of hounds
trans. To sing, utter musically. (Often with notion of ‘prolonged or drawling intonation,’ due to influence of sense 4.) Chiefly poetical.
To sing of, celebrate in song. poet.
music. To recite musically, intone; to sing a chant ,as the Psalms, etc., in public worship
fig. To talk or repeat a statement monotonously; to harp upon (obs.)

chant (n):

2. music. A short melody or phrase to which the Psalms, Canticles, etc., are sung in public worship. The essential characteristic of a chant is the long ‘reciting-note’ to which an indefinite number of syllables are sung, followed by a rhythmical cadence.

[2] Welsch, 173
[3] ‘Adoration of the Magi’ [first ed.] p. 37.
[4] The Wanderings Of Oisin and Other Poems, W.B. Yeats (London: Kegan Paul, 1889), p. 28.
[5] One critic apparently thought this demon ‘orgasm incarnate’ (Brown, Yeats, p. 44)g

copyright M.B.

More on Benjamin and Allegory

2007-08-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

For Benjamin, the origins of allegory lie, partly, in the re-coding of Pagan symbols by Christianity in the Middle Ages, when the ruins of that antiquity - making evident the “impermanence of things” - were everywhere[1]. The Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Christianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and extinct dignity – with a sovereign interpretative - and destructive – power:

“Venus/ Aphrodite, for example, once the natural symbol that raised human Eros to the level of divine love, lived on as ‘Dame World’, the profane, allegorical emblem of earthly passion.”[2]

The pantheon of ancient gods, “disconnected from the life-contexts out of which they sprang”, became “dead figures”, standing arbitrarily for the philosophical ideas they has once embodied as living symbols… They survived as demons, as astrological signs, as the faces of Tarot cards".[3]

What Benjamin takes to be at the origin of the allegorical impulse, is given first of all in the hard-wiring of monotheistic religion. Take for instance Judaism. Scholem writes as follows:

Jewish worship implied a renunciation, indeed a polemical rejection, of the images and symbols in which the mythical world finds its expression. Judaism strove to open up a region, that of monotheistic revelation, from which mythology would be excluded. Those vestiges of myth that were preserved here and there were shorn of their original symbolic power and taken in a purely metaphorical sense[4].

The theologians and philosophers, says Scholem, were “ concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements” (88) “.. tended to empty the concept of God”.

To empty Divinity of mythic figures, palpable semblance, of worldly flesh, is, conversely to empty mythic embodiments of any divinity. Myth is now redeemable only as a collection of manipulable signs, merely ‘signifying’ what they were once thought directly to express.

And given that there is no longer any worldly idiom appropriate for God’s expression, a different Nature now appears to humanity, no longer the image or appearance of Divinity, but a fallen realm of abandoned spaces and empty clues.

[1] See OGTD. p. 223: ".. the world of the ancient gods would have to die out, and it precisely allegorywhich preserved it. For an appreciation of the transciencey of things, and the concern to rescue them foreternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.”
[2] Buck-Morss, p. 163.
[3] Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 165.
[4] Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 88

symbolic support

2007-08-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

My sense of some of the ‘democratic’ potential of blogging is contained in this post on anonymity, and was implicit in these words of Benjamin. (Of course, there are all kinds of other potentials too). The defence against this democratic tendency often involves attempting to reintroduce the social supports of the offline world. as such it is uncomfortable with anonymity. Thus:

The prurient and finally conformist demand to pick away at the anonymous I, a bodiless script, until it reveals the contours of the person underneath. And this, not through wanting to touch reality, but only to secure some Symbolic foothold – establishing that your interlocutor is a woman, student, unemployed, non-professional, or that he/she wears some other convenient categorical label that allows you to place him or her, to restore the proper order of things. So, for example, a tenured professor, knowing that his interlocutor is a graduate student inquires as to her ‘urge to disagree’. He is now established as the psychoanalyst able to evaluate a discourse blind to its own motives. He feels the symbolic supports reassembling around himself. He suggests that the impulse to disagree is common among graduate students overeager to assert themselves. His institutionally conferred authority is restored, his grade of knowledge marked as superior.

Riding without a ticket

2007-08-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

If in a conversation you asked someone to explain a particular point they’d made, to justify some cliché, and they responded only by telling you that you obviously hadn’t read X or Y, or that you could easily do some research on this topic that would prevent you asking such questions, you’d be pretty unimpressed. To be honest, you be tempted to regard them as a posturing nitwit or merchant banker. In other contexts, however, the blogworld included, this seems to pass for valid retort. More exactly, it is one of the defences against a democratic tendency within blogging.

It implies, firstly, that the matter in hand is indeed one not of dialogue and contestation but only of Knowledge, and that the reprimanded individual does not yet occupy this place of Knowledge. The realm of Knowledge contains what has been agreed by ‘serious scholars /economists/ political analysts’ etc, it is unconcerned with mere politics and is, naturally, serenely indifferent to the squabbles of bloggers. It contains, for example, The Historical Record, which is not some contested field of representation, but (to quote those more knowledgeable than I) ‘the events of history as they appear in their correct order and final significance. It is the objective status of events, uncluttered by mere partisan interest and subjective interference.’

The totemic book for such people would be the encyclopaedia, where, seemingly sans author, a relation to knowledge without commitment or partiality inscribes itself. The encyclopaedia enshrines the myth of Canonical knowledge.

Let us call the pose affected by these people the ‘mandarin’ posture.

The mandarin posture is keen to assert that people are not competent or qualified to speak on certain subjects. (Politics is not Chomsky’s professional field etc). Usually, this asinine claim immediately rebounds in their own face unawares. But the invisible subscriptio to their remarks is: this person is speaking out of place. This kind of attitude constantly alludes to canonical and authorised knowledge (‘the historical record, ‘experts in the field’. The commenter signals that he/she occupies the place of proper and canonical knowledge. He/she would withhold your pass to the debating room, accuse you of riding the train without a ticket. But this ticket inspector is of course utterly bogus, for the whole point about blogging, and the point found threatening by some, is that it’s free to travel. No tickets required.

Risible Rhetorical Riffs

2007-08-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Not sure what to call this little rhetorical manoeuvre, but here’s an example of it - the polemical target is Terry Eagleton:

"The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions." [My italics]

It’s as if Eagleton’s ‘opinions’ are just some personal hobby-horse or idiosyncrasy*, the actual content of which is irrelevant. If someone’s ‘politics’ are marked by (say) a concern for social justice and democratic accountability, then he opposes a tyranny not because its existence ‘happens’ to offend ‘his own’ opinions but because of its injustice and unaccountability. I put ‘his own’ in scare quotes because these politics will in most cases be hardly just ‘his’ – they will be universal or certainly non-personal values that he believes in. If someone advocates torture, her ‘opinion’ is certainly different from my own, but I oppose it because of a commitment to certain universal values. Johaan Hari pulled a similar stunt some time ago, pretending that I was simply unable to tolerate a (ie any) different opinion. Of course, I was intolerant of his piece not because it was ‘different’ but because it was demonstrable nonsense. In any case, how can you disagree with someone who’s opinions are NOT different from your own?? The notion is trivially nonsensical.

* This is perhaps the trick. Implicitly, someone taking exception to my opinions is analogous to someone taking exception to my pug nose or curiously expressive eyebrows. It’s reduced to something subjective and capricious.

intertextual question?

2007-08-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

A rather obscure literary question. I'd be interested to know whether you think these lines by Yeats:

'But seek alone to hear the strange things said /By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, /And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.'

sound like an echo of this from Corinthians:

"For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man
understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries"

or not.

Another note on postmodern irony

2007-08-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

I read that one philosopher-blogger declared that everything he says is a joke. A declaration which would itself be a fairly predictable self-cancelling philosophical joke, no sooner made than evaporating in a question mark. Regardless, the remark reminded me of the empty, faux-ludic nihilism of contemporary ‘irony’ – serving no purpose, devoid of critical or satirical intent, endlessly putting its own speech in quotation marks and the world in brackets. Sometimes it poses as a Deconstructive provisionality, a radicalism so subtle & subjunctive as to leave things exactly as they were before; other times it is a paralysed mockery, its suspicion of seriousness, commitment or Causes merely the alibi of political compliance and withdrawal. (Such ‘philosophical’ versions are doubtless on a cultural continuum with the vacuous and smug sniggering of what k-punk calls Popism). The ‘ironical’ attitude, where it theorises, claims to be aware of contingency, limitedness, the possibilities of untruth. It claims to speak and act from a kind of meta-level. But this supposed meta-level is just one more stance within the world. Irony is no escape. And the only appropriate response to the endless reminders of contingency etc is ‘Well obviously, and..?’