Tuesday, October 11, 2011
maggie had this on her bookshelf, and i am working through it: and was going to mention it to Rev Joesph Walker as he is an anglican priest who had a kid who had downs. in the midst of the email, i looked at his blog for the first time in a few months, and he died of cancer in august--really young with 6 kids.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Depression is a medical fact. It is a pathology determined by doctors, and by a medical establishment, and it is away from any self-identification. To be depressed is to fit a very specific set of criteria—criteria that come from hiercahlised taxonomy of medicine and not from any other field of human endeavor that could give us clues to how we are feeling, or how we construct identities around those feelings. One is depressed, not because of spiritual ennui, or political dissatisfaction, or alienation from the world, or exhaustion and mourning at the state of the world. All of those reasons had a history in the west—and more specific reasons too. The medical language, being triumphant, shut its doors, and only allowed a set of language and identity that would reinforce its power, and the legitimacy of its construction
There is only one depression—depression that one might feel, the DSM suggests that “depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). But this sadness and emptiness—these feelings of being apart from the world, must be confirmed by an authority. There is little respect for self-definitions, for identities that are not confirmed by an identified outside.
If we think of people—and this might be a modernist fallacy, but it is a modernist fallacy that has been held as a chief value of our culture---as capable of making identity constructions for themselves, to determine how their moods work in concert to themselves and their larger identities—then low mood, or sadness, or emptiness, might be the pathologizing depression, or might be something else. Those low moods might be vital to an understanding of self, or to a larger understanding of how the world works. In the DSM mode, those low moods can be nothing but a disease. Once we entire the world of medicine, we enter this dialectic of that which must be cured and that which must be eliminated—regardless of how that curing or elimination might prove to be valuable, or if not valuable, at least autonomous.
This is obviously a Foccualdian tack, about how the authority of self-construction is lost in where observation occurs—the observation of the prison or the school or the clinic. The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.1
For Foucault, the observing is not an act of simple reportage—it is an act of seeing—that makes discourse that might unsettle, or problematize or unsurface previously unknown depths. The fear of reorganization is the fear of finding a self, that might result in a scuppering completely a system of observed and observing. The more aware that the clinic is of this, the more the clinic works to preserve its own order—pyscho-analysis gives its power to the bio-medical, the bio-medical forgets it's beginnings as a psychoanalytic place. This repressing history through a politicized looking that denies the power of the individual to remake themselves in their own image, suggests the creation of an archive that evades identification.
To refuse this evasion, is to seek solutions in historical seeing, and observable history—it is to do the discourse without the permission of the clinic—but also to recognize which histories the clinics have repressed. In Foucault’s ideas of archives, it is not libraries, texts and books that are easily found, but a set of discourses that move around, that are never in the same place, that contain texts, but texts defined as bodies, as desires, as history, as memory, as the marginalia of lived experiences. It is an either/or not a but/and way of looking through the world. So, looking through the history of depression, and finding its history through these Focculadian visions and archives, the question becomes what other spaces and what other histories exist that allow us to examine what depression could be, without attempting to eliminate it or without having the medical establishment define what should be a personal seeking of narrative and understanding.
The question then becomes, what other ways of looking at depression have existed. Using the lens of a theologian, what words have used in a religious context to explain this set of moods and experiences. The one that seems to be the most common is melancholia. Melancholia is not strictly depression—it exists before both bio-medical and pyscho-analytic work on hierarchy and taxonomy. It is best defined against taxonomic forms. Two writers have attempted to work through though explaining what melancholy was—and historically recruiting them to help us define depression outside of the failures of 20th century models. One of these models is exterior—his attempts to find what melancholy is works like black ink through clear water. The other model is interior—her attempts to find what melancholy is, is a delicate set of internal negotiations, where the inner components of humanity carbonize into shards of crystalline sadness.
The first model is Robert Burton. Anglican Priest, Calvinist, and Academic—his eccentric document: Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621, is an anatomy in two senses. It is an academic anatomy—where a book is written as an attempted gloss on anything about a certain topic, functioning as a one topic encyclopedia. The second sense, is the one in which we are familiar with—anatomy as a discussion of the body. Burton’s work is a literal embodiment of flesh and understanding.
The second model, is Emily Dickinson, Poet, Calvinist, and falsely thought to be a recluse, her poetry written in American throughout the mid-19th century, is profoundly melancholic—it offers none of the definitions expected of Burton's work, but in the side long glances she was notorious for, discussed the interior life of the melancholic. These two writers, reclaimed for our own historical context, allow for wider and more self-directed definitions of what depression could be, or the use function of refusing the label depression and reclaiming that of the melancholic,
Melancholy had been previously defined as an excess of black bile—Burton positions this as the canonical ideal of how melancholy is achieved in the first book of his Anatomy: “HAVING thus briefly anatomized the body and soul of man; as a preparative to the rest, I may now freely proceed to treat of my intended object to most men's capacity, and after many ambages perspicuously define what this Melancholy is, shew his name and differences. The name is imposed from the matter, and disease denominated from the material cause, as Bruel observes, Melancholia, a sort of melaina {black) chole (choler), from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease, or symptom let Donatus Altomarus and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath several descriptions, notations, and definitions.”
Burton begins, and then with precedent, his sorting out what this melancholy is, must come from a history of naming, and a history of sorting. In this case, the language (melania) and the substance (the black Choler) historically combined to a number of factors—but each of these factors originated in an early, proto-materialism. The proof of melancholy was extended by the body, and the body’s failures were proof of the emotional mindset of melancholic identity. The anatomy then, that results from this introduction, was an investigative potential of the “several descriptions, notations, and definitions” The power of the black choler could be sorted through a taxonomic effort—a taxonomic effort that would later be recognized in Foucault’s history of both the clinic and the archive.
It must be recognized, though as a priest and a doctor, Burton uses the best science of his time, the science that is constructed here, is in the midst of a radical reinvention of the world. Burton’s Melancholy, in this passage, and elsewhere extends outwards—it is a construction that is marked by excess and exteriority. Too much writing, too much melancholy, too much thinking, and too much black choler all center not into one place, but in a miasma of emotion, text and history.
The changes of 17th century medicine, religion, and by extension religion, suggest that this excess perhaps could not be balanced either within a community, or within the larger understanding of the world at large. The tension in Burton—is between a melancholy, as defined as something that is interior, that settles into the marrow, and becomes part of the person, and a melancholy that can be defined as something that is a cloud of fine mist, sometimes settling more on one thing then the other, but through the air—a pollution, like smog or smoke.
Each of these, the marrow or the smoke, is a temporary notice of the imbalance of a personality—it does not suggest an identity, like modern ideas of depression, but it also does not suggest that the mood can be cured. The idea of being fixed—namely that the excessive miasma has grown to a solidity that can be settled into marrow, and the idea that this settling is inviolable, begins with Burton’s time, but the Anatomy is nervous about the idea of fixing. For a document that is supposed to be about creating a taxonomic, and air tight definition of what melancholy could be considered, the book is profoundly ambiguous about what fixing would look like.
The chief notable general fact about the Anatomy of Melancholy is not the exteriority of it, nor its excessive qualities, or its attempts to create one identity out of many, but how often it fails at being cohesive. Perhaps because Melancholy itself is not cohesive—which might mark the early modern from the late modern ,the idea of depression as cohesive, as a checklist, as an agreement on symptoms that can be battled through or suffered against. But in Burton’s early modern renderings, are about creating the encyclopedia of failures. Where one is unbalanced, and where that unbalance can perhaps extend, in a linguistic sense, into the world.
Burton’s attempt at marking the limits of melancholy, and his refusal to think of melancholy as just choleric, through the form of a taxonomic obsessiveness, eventually mark the failures of the encyclopedia itself. Nothing can be mapped in its entirety. There is a gap between the platonic ideal of information technologies form, and what becomes written itself—because perhaps of the nature of creation.
This lack of cohesiveness, and the mark of failure from a platonic whole, is an oddly comforting idea, and an idea that can be inherited from Burton’s Calvinism. The Calvinist idea that we are a totally depraved, and in that depravity we fall short from the glory of God in such a way that we are never able to fully understand him, any encyclopedic text is going to fail in the same complete ways. Burton’s textual failures at encompassing all of what melancholy could be, and his failures at making the work clean and quite comprehensive, is a textual mirroring of man’s attempt to gain understanding of the divine, and his or her failures to do so.
This mirroring can be made exterior in a really important way—we all fall short of the glory of god—and the recognizing of this failing short, is our first mark of humanity. We cannot know God, and that we fall short from His glory, is like the shame that Adam and Eve felt after they had feasted on the tree at the garden of Good and Evil. Burton’s ideas of melancholy come, not from an excess of Chloer, but from awareness, through a Calvinist lens, of his failures as a human. His humanism (as part of the encyclopedic project) and his devotion to a God, who might as well be absent, are foundational to an isolation, which suggests a kind of melancholy as de facto part of our humanness.
If Burton’s isolation is exterior—it marks human’s isolation from God, and towards an exterior attempt at recreating a kind of humanity—then his American Calvinist compatriot, does similar work, facing inwards.
Dickinson’s relationship to Calvin is obviously different than Burton’s—-there was a separation of geography, time, and of gender. Calvin had crossed the ocean, and settled by the time that Dickinson had inherited it resulting in the tension of absorption and rejection that exists within the text. Burton was the explorer working through the text, trying on new ideas, and never rejecting one. Dickinson’s rejection of ideas was a rejection of her Calvinist heritage, and her absorbing of ideas was a conscious choice of accepting what that Calvinism has taught her.
This sense, might explain the difference in the structures of Dickinson and Burton’s writing, and the problems of the structure might explain how melancholy becomes part of being. If Burton’s melancholy was about an exteriority, if it functioned like black ink in clear water—and if it was expressed by spreading, staining, and by being unable to be uncontained, than Dickinson’s melancholy functioned as an interiority—it was expressed by a clear and focused selfhood---it’s containment pressed down and shattered inward.
This shattering inward could be seen as similar to Burton’s realization of his totally depraved state—but Dickinson’s dissent was constructed at a time, when engagement with the proper praxis of theological life would alleviate this depravity. Moving away from the puritan understanding of the world, or at least allowing for a light to come in on the closed system of how the puritans understood the divine, would result in the intense separation of man from God that preachers had told puritans to avoid. It would be welcoming the isolation of total depravity.
Joanna Yin describes quite acutely of what occurs in this questioning and this pulling apart: “Instead of functioning as a mirror for external images of a culture that craves certainty, Dickinson concentrates on her inner self. The skeptical person shedding traditional means of religious consolation risks experiencing the horror of the unknown. Deprived of theological scaffolding, the questioning Puritan, like anyone attempting to examine a dominant ideology, can feel disoriented and ungrounded. When the speaker of P378 saw that "The Heavens were stitched," she "touched the Universe—// And back it slid—and I alone—/ A Speck upon a Ball—/ Went out upon Circumference —." These genealogical moments are terrifying to both the speaker and the reader. Yet because Dickinson creates as she deconstructs, she can often bridge or at least face the abyss that she uncovers.
The creation at the same time as the deconstructing does not only come from the creation of Dickinson’s poetry—though this was where here must formal approaches of working against religious consolation concurs, it must be carefully noted—that the interiority of Dickinson’s work was a formal concern –or at least the expression of Dickinson’s translation of melancholy forms, could be constructed as a formal exercise. The idea of Dickinson I n the popular imagination as a nun who refused human contact, a mad woman in white, or a new kind of American anchorite was never accurate, and became a misogynist way of dismissing her work. She lived in community. She wrote extensive correspondence to friends and family. This correspondence was as often about weighty matters as it was about quotidian details, about what she ate for lunch and about a note of theological forms. As well, even though her poetry often contained images of exclusion, and lack of desire—the constant editing, the sending works out through this correspondence, and the creating of small books, called fascicles, suggested that Dickinson intended to have this work as a public set of discourses.
In this sense, the privacy of the poetry, a poetry about using one’s melancholy as a tool to engage with a necessary separation from a fallen world worked at cross purposes with a set of written discourses that encouraged a full engagement with the world. The correspondence and the poetry constructed a series of ironic matrices, where melancholy decentralized community involvement, and community involvement decentralized melancholy. These matrices were not only found where correspondence and poetry met, but in the inter-textual heritage of Dickinson’s spiritual reading.
Burton was creating an encyclopedia, and so his inter-textual work was expected, and the excesses of his intertextual work resulted logically from the text itself. Dickinson’s inter-textuality, told through a set of dashes, of slant rhymes, of absences, and of inheriting forms, was not a direct writing on the body, but an oblique awareness of where she did not belong, even in the tradition of puritan wiring and plain speech.
The reader can see this most clearly in how she literally and symbolically rewrote hymn forms—sometimes explicit hymns them. In her tight, difficult study comparing the original Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts to Dickinson, Shira Wolosky talks about the purpose of Dickinson’s inter-textual emphasis on Watt’s texts: “A surprising number of Dickinson poems seem written in direct response to particular Watts’s hymns. Furthermore, Dickinson's relation to Watts is not simply parodic. The hymnal frame of so much Dickinson verse asserts a genuine and profound effort to accept doctrines that she cannot, however, help but question, leading her in turn to question her own doubts.” She then goes on to work through a few poems—talking about where Dickinson fits formally in the tradition birthed by Watts.
Wolosky points out that where Watts leaves hope, or at least the potential for liberation by faith in the Divine, Dickinson leaves little room for doubt. Dickinson’s ironic reversals of Watt’s conventional Calvinist piety are the work of a melancholic mind, who constructs narratives not of redemption, but of denial, exhaustion, work, and eventually the tomb. While Watt’s tells his followers to “gird themselves with the gospels armor”, Dickinson rewrites this to mark the absence of the divine: “Go slow, my soul, to feed thyself//upon his rare approach —“. For Watt’s this girding results in the triumphalism of God and his servants. For Dickinson, God’s rareness leads to “Go boldly — for thou paid'st his price/Redemption — for a Kiss —“
Dickinson’s melancholic world view—positioned against Watt’s optimism, suggests that believers in Christ are closer to Judas than they are to soldiers triumphant on a religious battlefield. Dickinson’s theological impetuous ends in bodily death, namely in the suicidal body of Judas and not the resurrected body of Christ. The melancholic force of her writing shares an attachment to the corporeality of Burton’s anatomies—but an anatomy that comes from close personal inspection, and through the first person voice—and a first person voice that was often domestic.
A reader can see the connection between bodily death, the domestic, and corruption/rot in poems as diverse as So I Could Not Stop for Death, where Dickinson and Death, riding in a carriage, note: “We paused before a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground;/The roof was scarcely visible,/The cornice but a mound.” – this interlacing of the domestic, of the visible, and the invisible, of death, and of life—of the swelling of a house best by a rot that would eventually engulf flesh—marks the obsession with gaps, and absences—that deny a presence in traditional catholic sacramentialism. There are others: “To fill a Gap/ Insert the Thing that caused it—//Block it up/With Other—and 'twill yawn the more—//You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—; Where the personal fear of death—and of hell (the abyss) cannot be blocked, that the melancholy cannot cure melancholy, and that the desire for blockage and by extension wholeness cannot be found in traditional spaces.
Dickinson’s attempts at blockage, ad her acknowledgement of the abyss is profoundly different then Burton’s refusal to block anything. Dickinson’s death is about silence, waiting for death to come, and talking in small bits and quiet moments as a w ay of evading death—but death can never be fully evaded: “And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –//We talked between the Rooms –//Until the Moss had reached our lips –//And covered up — our names –“ . Truth and Beauty are not sufficient enough to survive past the falling apart of the flesh—of nature to absorb the arrogance of human communication. The melancholic failure of communication as a way of evading death becomes a textual and personal way of working past the Calvinist ideas of total depravity—but just as Burton recognized that total depravity was a way of recognizing our own humanity—tiny and cowering against the expanse of an immobile God, then Dickinson recognizes the same kinds of awareness.
This is the use function of melancholy. It is not depression—as depression suggests something that can be readily cured, or that something should be cured. For Burton and for Dickinson melancholy is not depression. Melancholy is recognition of one’s inability to fully speak. Burton’s exterior attempts and failures to mark a full narrative of low mood succeeded in placing low mood in its proper spiritual place—low mood is not a medical condition, it is not a mark of the clinic, or the chapel, but of the human beings recognition of their minute place in a universe that is carelessly large. Dickinson’s recreating of her tradition, hymns, correspondence anti-sacramental nature of congregational practice brought her closer to her own interior nature, and her own closeness to death. The denial of the sublime, the swelling of the house that would contain her until her death, was all a blossoming of her place in the larger corpus of family, of town, of country—and of eventually world.
The interior, almost mystic, energy of Dickinson’s melancholy, and the exterior, anti-mystic energy of Burton’s melancholy both led to a place that talked quite sweetly about the absence of divine spirit, and of the necessity of living in the world, on its terms. To evade the clinic is to acknowledge the place for lowness and humility.
There is only one depression—depression that one might feel, the DSM suggests that “depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). But this sadness and emptiness—these feelings of being apart from the world, must be confirmed by an authority. There is little respect for self-definitions, for identities that are not confirmed by an identified outside.
If we think of people—and this might be a modernist fallacy, but it is a modernist fallacy that has been held as a chief value of our culture---as capable of making identity constructions for themselves, to determine how their moods work in concert to themselves and their larger identities—then low mood, or sadness, or emptiness, might be the pathologizing depression, or might be something else. Those low moods might be vital to an understanding of self, or to a larger understanding of how the world works. In the DSM mode, those low moods can be nothing but a disease. Once we entire the world of medicine, we enter this dialectic of that which must be cured and that which must be eliminated—regardless of how that curing or elimination might prove to be valuable, or if not valuable, at least autonomous.
This is obviously a Foccualdian tack, about how the authority of self-construction is lost in where observation occurs—the observation of the prison or the school or the clinic. The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.1
For Foucault, the observing is not an act of simple reportage—it is an act of seeing—that makes discourse that might unsettle, or problematize or unsurface previously unknown depths. The fear of reorganization is the fear of finding a self, that might result in a scuppering completely a system of observed and observing. The more aware that the clinic is of this, the more the clinic works to preserve its own order—pyscho-analysis gives its power to the bio-medical, the bio-medical forgets it's beginnings as a psychoanalytic place. This repressing history through a politicized looking that denies the power of the individual to remake themselves in their own image, suggests the creation of an archive that evades identification.
To refuse this evasion, is to seek solutions in historical seeing, and observable history—it is to do the discourse without the permission of the clinic—but also to recognize which histories the clinics have repressed. In Foucault’s ideas of archives, it is not libraries, texts and books that are easily found, but a set of discourses that move around, that are never in the same place, that contain texts, but texts defined as bodies, as desires, as history, as memory, as the marginalia of lived experiences. It is an either/or not a but/and way of looking through the world. So, looking through the history of depression, and finding its history through these Focculadian visions and archives, the question becomes what other spaces and what other histories exist that allow us to examine what depression could be, without attempting to eliminate it or without having the medical establishment define what should be a personal seeking of narrative and understanding.
The question then becomes, what other ways of looking at depression have existed. Using the lens of a theologian, what words have used in a religious context to explain this set of moods and experiences. The one that seems to be the most common is melancholia. Melancholia is not strictly depression—it exists before both bio-medical and pyscho-analytic work on hierarchy and taxonomy. It is best defined against taxonomic forms. Two writers have attempted to work through though explaining what melancholy was—and historically recruiting them to help us define depression outside of the failures of 20th century models. One of these models is exterior—his attempts to find what melancholy is works like black ink through clear water. The other model is interior—her attempts to find what melancholy is, is a delicate set of internal negotiations, where the inner components of humanity carbonize into shards of crystalline sadness.
The first model is Robert Burton. Anglican Priest, Calvinist, and Academic—his eccentric document: Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621, is an anatomy in two senses. It is an academic anatomy—where a book is written as an attempted gloss on anything about a certain topic, functioning as a one topic encyclopedia. The second sense, is the one in which we are familiar with—anatomy as a discussion of the body. Burton’s work is a literal embodiment of flesh and understanding.
The second model, is Emily Dickinson, Poet, Calvinist, and falsely thought to be a recluse, her poetry written in American throughout the mid-19th century, is profoundly melancholic—it offers none of the definitions expected of Burton's work, but in the side long glances she was notorious for, discussed the interior life of the melancholic. These two writers, reclaimed for our own historical context, allow for wider and more self-directed definitions of what depression could be, or the use function of refusing the label depression and reclaiming that of the melancholic,
Melancholy had been previously defined as an excess of black bile—Burton positions this as the canonical ideal of how melancholy is achieved in the first book of his Anatomy: “HAVING thus briefly anatomized the body and soul of man; as a preparative to the rest, I may now freely proceed to treat of my intended object to most men's capacity, and after many ambages perspicuously define what this Melancholy is, shew his name and differences. The name is imposed from the matter, and disease denominated from the material cause, as Bruel observes, Melancholia, a sort of melaina {black) chole (choler), from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease, or symptom let Donatus Altomarus and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath several descriptions, notations, and definitions.”
Burton begins, and then with precedent, his sorting out what this melancholy is, must come from a history of naming, and a history of sorting. In this case, the language (melania) and the substance (the black Choler) historically combined to a number of factors—but each of these factors originated in an early, proto-materialism. The proof of melancholy was extended by the body, and the body’s failures were proof of the emotional mindset of melancholic identity. The anatomy then, that results from this introduction, was an investigative potential of the “several descriptions, notations, and definitions” The power of the black choler could be sorted through a taxonomic effort—a taxonomic effort that would later be recognized in Foucault’s history of both the clinic and the archive.
It must be recognized, though as a priest and a doctor, Burton uses the best science of his time, the science that is constructed here, is in the midst of a radical reinvention of the world. Burton’s Melancholy, in this passage, and elsewhere extends outwards—it is a construction that is marked by excess and exteriority. Too much writing, too much melancholy, too much thinking, and too much black choler all center not into one place, but in a miasma of emotion, text and history.
The changes of 17th century medicine, religion, and by extension religion, suggest that this excess perhaps could not be balanced either within a community, or within the larger understanding of the world at large. The tension in Burton—is between a melancholy, as defined as something that is interior, that settles into the marrow, and becomes part of the person, and a melancholy that can be defined as something that is a cloud of fine mist, sometimes settling more on one thing then the other, but through the air—a pollution, like smog or smoke.
Each of these, the marrow or the smoke, is a temporary notice of the imbalance of a personality—it does not suggest an identity, like modern ideas of depression, but it also does not suggest that the mood can be cured. The idea of being fixed—namely that the excessive miasma has grown to a solidity that can be settled into marrow, and the idea that this settling is inviolable, begins with Burton’s time, but the Anatomy is nervous about the idea of fixing. For a document that is supposed to be about creating a taxonomic, and air tight definition of what melancholy could be considered, the book is profoundly ambiguous about what fixing would look like.
The chief notable general fact about the Anatomy of Melancholy is not the exteriority of it, nor its excessive qualities, or its attempts to create one identity out of many, but how often it fails at being cohesive. Perhaps because Melancholy itself is not cohesive—which might mark the early modern from the late modern ,the idea of depression as cohesive, as a checklist, as an agreement on symptoms that can be battled through or suffered against. But in Burton’s early modern renderings, are about creating the encyclopedia of failures. Where one is unbalanced, and where that unbalance can perhaps extend, in a linguistic sense, into the world.
Burton’s attempt at marking the limits of melancholy, and his refusal to think of melancholy as just choleric, through the form of a taxonomic obsessiveness, eventually mark the failures of the encyclopedia itself. Nothing can be mapped in its entirety. There is a gap between the platonic ideal of information technologies form, and what becomes written itself—because perhaps of the nature of creation.
This lack of cohesiveness, and the mark of failure from a platonic whole, is an oddly comforting idea, and an idea that can be inherited from Burton’s Calvinism. The Calvinist idea that we are a totally depraved, and in that depravity we fall short from the glory of God in such a way that we are never able to fully understand him, any encyclopedic text is going to fail in the same complete ways. Burton’s textual failures at encompassing all of what melancholy could be, and his failures at making the work clean and quite comprehensive, is a textual mirroring of man’s attempt to gain understanding of the divine, and his or her failures to do so.
This mirroring can be made exterior in a really important way—we all fall short of the glory of god—and the recognizing of this failing short, is our first mark of humanity. We cannot know God, and that we fall short from His glory, is like the shame that Adam and Eve felt after they had feasted on the tree at the garden of Good and Evil. Burton’s ideas of melancholy come, not from an excess of Chloer, but from awareness, through a Calvinist lens, of his failures as a human. His humanism (as part of the encyclopedic project) and his devotion to a God, who might as well be absent, are foundational to an isolation, which suggests a kind of melancholy as de facto part of our humanness.
If Burton’s isolation is exterior—it marks human’s isolation from God, and towards an exterior attempt at recreating a kind of humanity—then his American Calvinist compatriot, does similar work, facing inwards.
Dickinson’s relationship to Calvin is obviously different than Burton’s—-there was a separation of geography, time, and of gender. Calvin had crossed the ocean, and settled by the time that Dickinson had inherited it resulting in the tension of absorption and rejection that exists within the text. Burton was the explorer working through the text, trying on new ideas, and never rejecting one. Dickinson’s rejection of ideas was a rejection of her Calvinist heritage, and her absorbing of ideas was a conscious choice of accepting what that Calvinism has taught her.
This sense, might explain the difference in the structures of Dickinson and Burton’s writing, and the problems of the structure might explain how melancholy becomes part of being. If Burton’s melancholy was about an exteriority, if it functioned like black ink in clear water—and if it was expressed by spreading, staining, and by being unable to be uncontained, than Dickinson’s melancholy functioned as an interiority—it was expressed by a clear and focused selfhood---it’s containment pressed down and shattered inward.
This shattering inward could be seen as similar to Burton’s realization of his totally depraved state—but Dickinson’s dissent was constructed at a time, when engagement with the proper praxis of theological life would alleviate this depravity. Moving away from the puritan understanding of the world, or at least allowing for a light to come in on the closed system of how the puritans understood the divine, would result in the intense separation of man from God that preachers had told puritans to avoid. It would be welcoming the isolation of total depravity.
Joanna Yin describes quite acutely of what occurs in this questioning and this pulling apart: “Instead of functioning as a mirror for external images of a culture that craves certainty, Dickinson concentrates on her inner self. The skeptical person shedding traditional means of religious consolation risks experiencing the horror of the unknown. Deprived of theological scaffolding, the questioning Puritan, like anyone attempting to examine a dominant ideology, can feel disoriented and ungrounded. When the speaker of P378 saw that "The Heavens were stitched," she "touched the Universe—// And back it slid—and I alone—/ A Speck upon a Ball—/ Went out upon Circumference —." These genealogical moments are terrifying to both the speaker and the reader. Yet because Dickinson creates as she deconstructs, she can often bridge or at least face the abyss that she uncovers.
The creation at the same time as the deconstructing does not only come from the creation of Dickinson’s poetry—though this was where here must formal approaches of working against religious consolation concurs, it must be carefully noted—that the interiority of Dickinson’s work was a formal concern –or at least the expression of Dickinson’s translation of melancholy forms, could be constructed as a formal exercise. The idea of Dickinson I n the popular imagination as a nun who refused human contact, a mad woman in white, or a new kind of American anchorite was never accurate, and became a misogynist way of dismissing her work. She lived in community. She wrote extensive correspondence to friends and family. This correspondence was as often about weighty matters as it was about quotidian details, about what she ate for lunch and about a note of theological forms. As well, even though her poetry often contained images of exclusion, and lack of desire—the constant editing, the sending works out through this correspondence, and the creating of small books, called fascicles, suggested that Dickinson intended to have this work as a public set of discourses.
In this sense, the privacy of the poetry, a poetry about using one’s melancholy as a tool to engage with a necessary separation from a fallen world worked at cross purposes with a set of written discourses that encouraged a full engagement with the world. The correspondence and the poetry constructed a series of ironic matrices, where melancholy decentralized community involvement, and community involvement decentralized melancholy. These matrices were not only found where correspondence and poetry met, but in the inter-textual heritage of Dickinson’s spiritual reading.
Burton was creating an encyclopedia, and so his inter-textual work was expected, and the excesses of his intertextual work resulted logically from the text itself. Dickinson’s inter-textuality, told through a set of dashes, of slant rhymes, of absences, and of inheriting forms, was not a direct writing on the body, but an oblique awareness of where she did not belong, even in the tradition of puritan wiring and plain speech.
The reader can see this most clearly in how she literally and symbolically rewrote hymn forms—sometimes explicit hymns them. In her tight, difficult study comparing the original Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts to Dickinson, Shira Wolosky talks about the purpose of Dickinson’s inter-textual emphasis on Watt’s texts: “A surprising number of Dickinson poems seem written in direct response to particular Watts’s hymns. Furthermore, Dickinson's relation to Watts is not simply parodic. The hymnal frame of so much Dickinson verse asserts a genuine and profound effort to accept doctrines that she cannot, however, help but question, leading her in turn to question her own doubts.” She then goes on to work through a few poems—talking about where Dickinson fits formally in the tradition birthed by Watts.
Wolosky points out that where Watts leaves hope, or at least the potential for liberation by faith in the Divine, Dickinson leaves little room for doubt. Dickinson’s ironic reversals of Watt’s conventional Calvinist piety are the work of a melancholic mind, who constructs narratives not of redemption, but of denial, exhaustion, work, and eventually the tomb. While Watt’s tells his followers to “gird themselves with the gospels armor”, Dickinson rewrites this to mark the absence of the divine: “Go slow, my soul, to feed thyself//upon his rare approach —“. For Watt’s this girding results in the triumphalism of God and his servants. For Dickinson, God’s rareness leads to “Go boldly — for thou paid'st his price/Redemption — for a Kiss —“
Dickinson’s melancholic world view—positioned against Watt’s optimism, suggests that believers in Christ are closer to Judas than they are to soldiers triumphant on a religious battlefield. Dickinson’s theological impetuous ends in bodily death, namely in the suicidal body of Judas and not the resurrected body of Christ. The melancholic force of her writing shares an attachment to the corporeality of Burton’s anatomies—but an anatomy that comes from close personal inspection, and through the first person voice—and a first person voice that was often domestic.
A reader can see the connection between bodily death, the domestic, and corruption/rot in poems as diverse as So I Could Not Stop for Death, where Dickinson and Death, riding in a carriage, note: “We paused before a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground;/The roof was scarcely visible,/The cornice but a mound.” – this interlacing of the domestic, of the visible, and the invisible, of death, and of life—of the swelling of a house best by a rot that would eventually engulf flesh—marks the obsession with gaps, and absences—that deny a presence in traditional catholic sacramentialism. There are others: “To fill a Gap/ Insert the Thing that caused it—//Block it up/With Other—and 'twill yawn the more—//You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—; Where the personal fear of death—and of hell (the abyss) cannot be blocked, that the melancholy cannot cure melancholy, and that the desire for blockage and by extension wholeness cannot be found in traditional spaces.
Dickinson’s attempts at blockage, ad her acknowledgement of the abyss is profoundly different then Burton’s refusal to block anything. Dickinson’s death is about silence, waiting for death to come, and talking in small bits and quiet moments as a w ay of evading death—but death can never be fully evaded: “And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –//We talked between the Rooms –//Until the Moss had reached our lips –//And covered up — our names –“ . Truth and Beauty are not sufficient enough to survive past the falling apart of the flesh—of nature to absorb the arrogance of human communication. The melancholic failure of communication as a way of evading death becomes a textual and personal way of working past the Calvinist ideas of total depravity—but just as Burton recognized that total depravity was a way of recognizing our own humanity—tiny and cowering against the expanse of an immobile God, then Dickinson recognizes the same kinds of awareness.
This is the use function of melancholy. It is not depression—as depression suggests something that can be readily cured, or that something should be cured. For Burton and for Dickinson melancholy is not depression. Melancholy is recognition of one’s inability to fully speak. Burton’s exterior attempts and failures to mark a full narrative of low mood succeeded in placing low mood in its proper spiritual place—low mood is not a medical condition, it is not a mark of the clinic, or the chapel, but of the human beings recognition of their minute place in a universe that is carelessly large. Dickinson’s recreating of her tradition, hymns, correspondence anti-sacramental nature of congregational practice brought her closer to her own interior nature, and her own closeness to death. The denial of the sublime, the swelling of the house that would contain her until her death, was all a blossoming of her place in the larger corpus of family, of town, of country—and of eventually world.
The interior, almost mystic, energy of Dickinson’s melancholy, and the exterior, anti-mystic energy of Burton’s melancholy both led to a place that talked quite sweetly about the absence of divine spirit, and of the necessity of living in the world, on its terms. To evade the clinic is to acknowledge the place for lowness and humility.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
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| From September 29, 2011 |
Murdoch is god father to one of Tony Blair's children.
Koneig's house in Tujanga--one of those glass and beams, all light LA wonders is for sale--link goes to a bunch of pictures and one construction drawing.
speaking of LA and construction Doug Smith's photos of foreclosed homes are haunting.
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| From September 29, 2011 |
This might be the most 90s photo ever taken.
Chicago REader used one of my photos.
New Hammer show of Whiteread drawings, including a loveley one of her ghosted stairs.
The Hooters Girls remember 9/11
3 women is coming out on Criteron, finally!
Anti Roma violence and violent rheotric is racheting up in Czech Republic.
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| From September 29, 2011 |
Rberg foto of Merce Cunningham, from a collection of photos taken in the mid 50s to the late 60s, published by DAP. Impressed at how incorperated this photo is, how much it is of a dancer aware of his own body.
Cherry Martin the london gallery, has a show of black and white photographs made into manquettes and sculptural bits, tiny and quite lovely.
Rick Perry saves the world from the spirit of evil first nation cannibals.
70 Ghanain movie posters
Skin a Deer with a pick up truck.
the atlantic's new blog on cities is brilliant, this eccentric but much needed essay on cul d sacs and surburban construction is a good place to start.
6 examples of Death on a PAle Horse, including a v. late BAsquit.
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| From September 29, 2011 |
Habitat being constructed.
inuit populations in alaska have increased rates of botulism, because of the switch from storing meat in the ground to rot, to storing meat in tupperware and ziplocs.
big Adams show at The Denver musuem of art.
fantastic short documentary on the gathering of juggalos
on Dekooning, musuem shows, and the problematic late work.
singles help family and community more than married folks.
Waid and Riveria's Daredevil comic is gorgeous.
Tenderfoot, aka as Adam Bohemer is a great folk singer, a man with an amazing beard, and really cute besides.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
I think what I think at this point was that i found it interesting that a number of male country artists who did albums as statements about their dying in the last couple of years made it harsher, harder, rougher--starting with the American Recordings by Cash and moving onwards--including but limited to Louvin, Wagoner and Kirstofferson. That this is so smooth, and so much like the golden age of AM radio really as a response to the harshness of other voices, is historically interesting--b/c Campbell wasn't an outlaw, and was almost if not a mirroring than a kind of correcting in terms of 70s country. In this sense, he is considering the trajectory that was set down for him by Webb (or to be more generous--the choice that he and Webb decided to embark on together)
Which is one of the things I really love about country music, is that the career arcs, and narratives are decades long, instead of weeks or months or even years. We are talking 40 years here.
about Glen Campbell's new single.
Which is one of the things I really love about country music, is that the career arcs, and narratives are decades long, instead of weeks or months or even years. We are talking 40 years here.
about Glen Campbell's new single.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The Rest Is Silence: The Tapes Hyang Cho
2011, 12 ft; dimensions variable , 189 cassette tapes with cases, 90 minutes each, tape recorder, speaker
This show had a number of peices, but this one was the most powerful for me. She recorded herself reading Spinoza's ethics word by word, on a set of 90 minute tapes. As one tape ended, she would type what reminded her of the work Sometimes its nothing, sometimes its these really problematic words about sex and death--the tapes would be played in sequence--each word would be underlined, and the pencil would be rubbed off on a blank notebook afterwards.
it's an academic work, but Spinoza, with his efforts at and eventually failing to ride the intellectual line between his instincts and his traditon, and the non-western nature of Hyang Cho's other work, have an isolation and a lonliness, a profound fear at wanting to communicate, and being unable to communicate.
that the speaker is grey, and the tapes are black and white, and the edition of spinoza she chose was black, and the only colour was the gold along the spine--made it a visually stark work as well.
(note about analog vs digital)
2011, 12 ft; dimensions variable , 189 cassette tapes with cases, 90 minutes each, tape recorder, speaker
This show had a number of peices, but this one was the most powerful for me. She recorded herself reading Spinoza's ethics word by word, on a set of 90 minute tapes. As one tape ended, she would type what reminded her of the work Sometimes its nothing, sometimes its these really problematic words about sex and death--the tapes would be played in sequence--each word would be underlined, and the pencil would be rubbed off on a blank notebook afterwards.
it's an academic work, but Spinoza, with his efforts at and eventually failing to ride the intellectual line between his instincts and his traditon, and the non-western nature of Hyang Cho's other work, have an isolation and a lonliness, a profound fear at wanting to communicate, and being unable to communicate.
that the speaker is grey, and the tapes are black and white, and the edition of spinoza she chose was black, and the only colour was the gold along the spine--made it a visually stark work as well.
(note about analog vs digital)
Saturday, September 03, 2011
Ed Ruscha Beach Towel
Waste Landscape, Elise Moran and Clemence Morad.
materials: unsold CD+wire+inflatable
Surface : 500 m²
Torontoist visits Detroit's Mies buildings--including some amazing shots from lafette park--totally not disaster porn.
English High Courts note that stop and search seizures are racist against AFro Caribbean citizens.
Tariq Ali on the london riots
genuinely terrorfied about continual legal and extra=-legal attempts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to disenfranchise poor voters.
walter reed closes
which reminds me of this:
love these pants
204 page photobook on the nature of bounce
beautiful poster that taxomizes wrestlers name
love this punkcore/pyschobilly/bluegreass band from Austin.
Historical Comedy on the Invention of the Vibrator and Cronenberg's movie on Freud are the two that I really want to see at Tiff
Cineea Madrid's photos and story about the problems and successes of Nrothwest Rodeo, is genius.
Scottish Poetry Library used my photo.
Jane Mansfield, Photographer Unknown. mid 50s.
John Cain sought to arm Qadhafi.
Alan Cumming Butches Up Cabaret, with a Military Themed, Don't Tell Mama--sexy as fuck.
Etsuko Ichikawa is a glass blower from Seattle, who is working on drawings using paper and molten glass--this video of the procedure from the Anthropologist, borrows alot from Namuth's video/photos of Pollock--but it's oddly both more controlled and more destructive.
Scott Aarnson decimates academic publishing.
Jen Graves essay on whitness and race in suburban seattle reminds me discussions of race and whiteness in Edmonton.
I love in porn when the sign and the signifer collapse--the erect rocket and the flaccid penis.
Over 20 years on in the history of the episcopal ministry involving both genders, or as the Canadian Church said, bringing completeness to episcopal ministry, I no longer can actually seriously engage the argument about the validity of the sacraments celebrated by women. The sacraments we celebrate are valid and transform lives much as the sacraments celebrated by men in holy orders. That is because in the lives of the men and women the Holy Spirit has conferred gifts of grace. My successor in the Diocese of Edmonton was ordered deacon and priest by a woman in episcopal ministry who then was a co-consecrator at the episcopal consecration. In the USA there are a growing number of bishops all consecrated by the Presiding Bishop, also female. Apostolic Succession has not been endangered by these episcopal acts. Rather Apostolic Succession is the handing on of the apostolic faith and the authority to uphold and protect it, which has less to do with the pedigree of the episcopal minster than the work of the Holy Spirit... Victoria Williams on Women PReists.full essay here
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| From September 3, 2011 |
Waste Landscape, Elise Moran and Clemence Morad.
materials: unsold CD+wire+inflatable
Surface : 500 m²
Torontoist visits Detroit's Mies buildings--including some amazing shots from lafette park--totally not disaster porn.
English High Courts note that stop and search seizures are racist against AFro Caribbean citizens.
Tariq Ali on the london riots
genuinely terrorfied about continual legal and extra=-legal attempts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to disenfranchise poor voters.
walter reed closes
which reminds me of this:
love these pants
204 page photobook on the nature of bounce
beautiful poster that taxomizes wrestlers name
love this punkcore/pyschobilly/bluegreass band from Austin.
Historical Comedy on the Invention of the Vibrator and Cronenberg's movie on Freud are the two that I really want to see at Tiff
Cineea Madrid's photos and story about the problems and successes of Nrothwest Rodeo, is genius.
Scottish Poetry Library used my photo.
 |
| From September 3, 2011 |
Jane Mansfield, Photographer Unknown. mid 50s.
John Cain sought to arm Qadhafi.
Alan Cumming Butches Up Cabaret, with a Military Themed, Don't Tell Mama--sexy as fuck.
Etsuko Ichikawa is a glass blower from Seattle, who is working on drawings using paper and molten glass--this video of the procedure from the Anthropologist, borrows alot from Namuth's video/photos of Pollock--but it's oddly both more controlled and more destructive.
Scott Aarnson decimates academic publishing.
Jen Graves essay on whitness and race in suburban seattle reminds me discussions of race and whiteness in Edmonton.
 |
| From September 3, 2011 |
I love in porn when the sign and the signifer collapse--the erect rocket and the flaccid penis.
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| From September 3, 2011 |
I love in porn when the sign and the signifer collapse--the erect rocket and the flaccid penis.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Comment on Mefi about the Xian Dominonist thing.
I am a canadian, and I am in a liberal theological college, but I've been thinking about this for a while. I don't think there is one movement, but I think there should be things said:
a) That there is a large number of different political movements that could be considered Dominonist--and they rarely talk to each other. Rushdooney, of course and the Pentacostals, but also Mormons and some people who might not be protestant at all. And it ranges from a kind of manifest destiny to a very explicit seeking to violently overthrow the government. We should be careful of not putting everyone in the same pot.
b) I think that for a bunch of reasons, mainline protestant denominations have been drying out, and I think that mainline protestant denominations are a moderating force. Reagan's soft Presbyterianism was a far far way away from Rushdooney's more unaffilated Calvinism; and Bush's Methodism had much more moderation than some of his inner circle--but also remember his inner circle included atheists (Rove, Cheney). There is no atheists in Perry's inner circle--and Bachman does not have the moderation of mainstream denomination--She was part of the Wisconsin synod, which is the crazier ends of Lutheranism (Pope as Anti-Christ, etc) but her withdrawl from the synod is a major story, and one that has been under reported.
c) I think that secular reporters on the coast don't know how to read Religion and tend to be dismissive of it.
d) I think that the moving towards Africa (and I have a lot of evangelical friends who have spent time in Tanzanina, Malawai, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, and Nigeria) for example, and fueling the dangerous rhetoric about sexuality there is a set of Christian actions that combine colonialism with evangelicalism. I think that by using Africa as a testing ground, that they are working on how to bring that kind of work home, and that really scares me.
e) Cornelius van Til, the Dutch Calvinist, who was the first person to connect these thoughts together, ended up with some pretty difficult political positions. Van Til claims that there can be no neutral ground between the believer and the non believer, that there can be no place for conversation, for discussion--this seem to be an anathema to the democratic project.
f) This idea against neutrality suggests that via home schooling and other institutional building up, there is an attempt to pull certain kinds of American Christian's away from America--or to pull American citizens towards Christianity. There is a long tradition of dropping out, from the state, in Christendom, but that tradition is often tempered by a strong belief in hospitality. I am okay with the dropping out, but I think that the forcing towards, is a violation of Christian hospitality.
g) I don't like Calvin.
h) Rushdooney's holocaust denial is something that should pretty much disqualify him as a historian, which he claims to be. It is not outside the realm of Christan exceptionalism, and the connection between Zionism and antisemitism by his followers has a distasteful history.
i) as someone on the left, who is also spends time with a wide variety of Christians, and who is Christian himself, we have to be careful not to hang before trial, but there is a strong matter of concern here.
Bachman and Perry scare me, in ways that Wright doesn't--because I think Wright is working against privilege, and Bachman/Perry are working towards it.
I am a canadian, and I am in a liberal theological college, but I've been thinking about this for a while. I don't think there is one movement, but I think there should be things said:
a) That there is a large number of different political movements that could be considered Dominonist--and they rarely talk to each other. Rushdooney, of course and the Pentacostals, but also Mormons and some people who might not be protestant at all. And it ranges from a kind of manifest destiny to a very explicit seeking to violently overthrow the government. We should be careful of not putting everyone in the same pot.
b) I think that for a bunch of reasons, mainline protestant denominations have been drying out, and I think that mainline protestant denominations are a moderating force. Reagan's soft Presbyterianism was a far far way away from Rushdooney's more unaffilated Calvinism; and Bush's Methodism had much more moderation than some of his inner circle--but also remember his inner circle included atheists (Rove, Cheney). There is no atheists in Perry's inner circle--and Bachman does not have the moderation of mainstream denomination--She was part of the Wisconsin synod, which is the crazier ends of Lutheranism (Pope as Anti-Christ, etc) but her withdrawl from the synod is a major story, and one that has been under reported.
c) I think that secular reporters on the coast don't know how to read Religion and tend to be dismissive of it.
d) I think that the moving towards Africa (and I have a lot of evangelical friends who have spent time in Tanzanina, Malawai, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, and Nigeria) for example, and fueling the dangerous rhetoric about sexuality there is a set of Christian actions that combine colonialism with evangelicalism. I think that by using Africa as a testing ground, that they are working on how to bring that kind of work home, and that really scares me.
e) Cornelius van Til, the Dutch Calvinist, who was the first person to connect these thoughts together, ended up with some pretty difficult political positions. Van Til claims that there can be no neutral ground between the believer and the non believer, that there can be no place for conversation, for discussion--this seem to be an anathema to the democratic project.
f) This idea against neutrality suggests that via home schooling and other institutional building up, there is an attempt to pull certain kinds of American Christian's away from America--or to pull American citizens towards Christianity. There is a long tradition of dropping out, from the state, in Christendom, but that tradition is often tempered by a strong belief in hospitality. I am okay with the dropping out, but I think that the forcing towards, is a violation of Christian hospitality.
g) I don't like Calvin.
h) Rushdooney's holocaust denial is something that should pretty much disqualify him as a historian, which he claims to be. It is not outside the realm of Christan exceptionalism, and the connection between Zionism and antisemitism by his followers has a distasteful history.
i) as someone on the left, who is also spends time with a wide variety of Christians, and who is Christian himself, we have to be careful not to hang before trial, but there is a strong matter of concern here.
Bachman and Perry scare me, in ways that Wright doesn't--because I think Wright is working against privilege, and Bachman/Perry are working towards it.
I think i sort of figured out one of my problems with Robert Adams...the photog. I love him, and he is one of those people that I have been plagiarizing for a decade, so it might not quite be problem.
in his introduction to What We Brought to the New World, photos of Denver from the 70s, he qoutes Whitman and Keuroac to prove that Denver was a kind of paradise, and then talks about the suburbs of Houston, Seattle, Salt Lake and Phoenix.
He sees the documenting of these landscapes as an elegiac attempt to reclaim his work away from the suburbs work--work of metastasizing sameness, but he inadvertently created these tributes to the same kind of manifest destiny spirit he was railing against.
There is an invisible ley line b/w SLC and Edmonton--and Edmonton was like Denver and Houston in terms of money and oil and status and a kind of working class spendthriftness--a set of metaphors about plenty. Taking photos of the suburbs (and this is my photos of towns outside of Toronto, as well, I think) for me is marking what happened after the suburbs.
Like Baltz's New Industrial Parks, these are ur-narratives of aWestern Suburbness, that was new, and seems weathered and old after three decades--not the decay of industrial nostalgia, but what happens when those spaces are lived in.
Going back home, everything is across the highway,and the downtown is dead or dying. The suburbs are an organism that moves its bodies further out and further out. It takes the space of expansion. In the west there is still room to expand--and so downtowns die and the farmland is taken over by suburbs--and so Adams is prophetic about the west--but he is also wrong that the suburbs die. The west was never pure and the addition of the tract homes, the supermarkets, the developments never made it less pure--it was another kind of life. Maybe parasitic, but not in the way that Adams imagines.
in his introduction to What We Brought to the New World, photos of Denver from the 70s, he qoutes Whitman and Keuroac to prove that Denver was a kind of paradise, and then talks about the suburbs of Houston, Seattle, Salt Lake and Phoenix.
He sees the documenting of these landscapes as an elegiac attempt to reclaim his work away from the suburbs work--work of metastasizing sameness, but he inadvertently created these tributes to the same kind of manifest destiny spirit he was railing against.
There is an invisible ley line b/w SLC and Edmonton--and Edmonton was like Denver and Houston in terms of money and oil and status and a kind of working class spendthriftness--a set of metaphors about plenty. Taking photos of the suburbs (and this is my photos of towns outside of Toronto, as well, I think) for me is marking what happened after the suburbs.
Like Baltz's New Industrial Parks, these are ur-narratives of aWestern Suburbness, that was new, and seems weathered and old after three decades--not the decay of industrial nostalgia, but what happens when those spaces are lived in.
Going back home, everything is across the highway,and the downtown is dead or dying. The suburbs are an organism that moves its bodies further out and further out. It takes the space of expansion. In the west there is still room to expand--and so downtowns die and the farmland is taken over by suburbs--and so Adams is prophetic about the west--but he is also wrong that the suburbs die. The west was never pure and the addition of the tract homes, the supermarkets, the developments never made it less pure--it was another kind of life. Maybe parasitic, but not in the way that Adams imagines.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
These three passages could be considered about adoption and identity, because identity shifts, and refuses to be be the same throughout a life time, and because they are about questions of geography, of choice, of desire, they become complicated and difficult places. Painful places.
Joseph is the son of Jacob, literally and figuratively the son of Israel, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt—Egypt as a place of exile, but also Egypt as a place where patriachs gain power, a place in Isrealite imagination of wealth, of status, of earthly goods. Joseph was successful in Egypt, he was the second most powerful person in the land, he goes from a slave to a vizier, from an Israelite to someone who is found safety within the Egyptian court...this is not the only patriarch who goes through Egypt, who understands the power of otherness, of an exilic imagination, the isolation from the homeland, the being sent out and returning, or being forbidden from returning is central to the larger understanding of the world—it is seen in Moses, who liberates his people from the Pharaoh, and it is seen in Christ, who flees to Egypt, in order not to be killed by Herod, and so Joseph, becomes one beginning of the Israelites as strangers in a strange land, this strangeness requires of them an explicit sense of cultural and social memory: “"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."
Joseph so isolated from his family, that they sell him to the stranger, they abandon him, and after years, he returns—and this is the place where his forgiveness becomes intensely moving, the hugging the neck, the kissing of the forehead, his brothers eventually accepting of Joseph as prophetic though previously what sent Joseph away was his hearing the voice of god, no matter how obliquely, or symbolically—the younger brother becoming an example for the older brothers—the seeking and the gaining of forgiveness—of course it is an example, an intense, moving, radically renewing, almost raw, example of family, of forgiveness, of closeness, of the desire for completion, but also all of it, is intensely, forever a homecoming, but Joseph never loses the Egyptian part of himself, he is a citizen of Israel, and his family, and his people, but his land, the province he lives in, Goshen, is carved out of Egypt, and the way that he reads dreams and prophecies has an Egyptian style—remember that his brothers don't recognize Joseph when they first see him in the court of Egypt.
This question of inclusion and excision, of being an alien and being a member of a group, becomes firmer over time, there are rules, conclusions that are reached, so that the call of hospitality is given and so people do not lose their Jewish identity, so they do not become Babylonians, or Egyptians or Canaanites. Joseph becomes a way, in a liturgical sense, an introduction to the problems of the Gospel.
The gospel becomes really difficult for Christians who have a social justice bent, We try to be like Christ here, but Christ here is not the man who says the first will be last and the last will be first, he is not the christ of priority of the poor, or the one who talks about the leveling of inequility—here he uses a racial slur, and worse he tells the woman that she will never be part of the jewish culture “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”--for those of us who are not Jewish, who are not part of the lost sheep of Israel, how do we connect ourselves to the Lord, a Lord who in this passage who has decided to be abandon us---it reminds us that Christ was not a christian, that we as Christians are interlopers for the original message, and that we are not here, like christ, but we are the Caaniate woman, who are begging for a small intervention, a small notice of Grace, from a God who might not have priority for us, or at least at this point in time, in this point in the history of Christ, he was not for us.
In the Anglican tradition, there is a memory, of our base humanity, of our fallen nature, of our inability to fully understand or know the Master and our internalization of our separation from the divine comes from the difficult place where Christ isolates himself from the larger world. The prayer of humble access in the 1662 BCP can be seen as a place where we recognize that we are adapted into this tradition—it is not only our separation from the full glory of god, because of our humanness, it is because we are part of another tradition, a branch that has been transplanted onto the tree of life. Let me read that prayer:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
The prayer of Humble Access is the place where we are exilic, it is a mark of our exilic space.
This is where the epistle provides a place of grace—this fear that we are defiled, that we embody the problem of purity, because the first half of the gospel is about what can defile and what cannot defile, but the purity and the defiling happen at the same time—and just as we cannot presume to come to this thy table, we cannot presume to clean enough, to wash our hands the right way, or say the right words, or to pray sufficiently to be pure, We are Christian because we have agreed to be adopted into the family of Abraham, but we are still strangers in a strange land.
God's understanding, has grown wider, the contract he had with Abraham has grown past the lost sheep of Israel to the dissident members of other places and other tradition. Because we cannot understand God, because we are not perfect, and because God is perfect, because God is beyond time and space, and because we are stuck in our own temporalities, we cannot avoid being disobdienent—this is the exile that we live in, the absence from the divine, the being unable through our own skills, gifts, powers and understanding to receive the Eucharistic cup, the cup that was not taken away from Christ, though he asked.
This is grace and mercy, to be adopted into the citizenship of Israel, not with the awkard rules of hospitality not with the hostile word of Christ who only sought his own lambs, but if we want ot be adopted, if we want to be a member of the Abrahamic covenant, then we can be.
This choice cannot be easy, and we are still exiles from the lord—but there is power in this choice of adaptation, of adoption.
Joseph is the son of Jacob, literally and figuratively the son of Israel, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt—Egypt as a place of exile, but also Egypt as a place where patriachs gain power, a place in Isrealite imagination of wealth, of status, of earthly goods. Joseph was successful in Egypt, he was the second most powerful person in the land, he goes from a slave to a vizier, from an Israelite to someone who is found safety within the Egyptian court...this is not the only patriarch who goes through Egypt, who understands the power of otherness, of an exilic imagination, the isolation from the homeland, the being sent out and returning, or being forbidden from returning is central to the larger understanding of the world—it is seen in Moses, who liberates his people from the Pharaoh, and it is seen in Christ, who flees to Egypt, in order not to be killed by Herod, and so Joseph, becomes one beginning of the Israelites as strangers in a strange land, this strangeness requires of them an explicit sense of cultural and social memory: “"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."
Joseph so isolated from his family, that they sell him to the stranger, they abandon him, and after years, he returns—and this is the place where his forgiveness becomes intensely moving, the hugging the neck, the kissing of the forehead, his brothers eventually accepting of Joseph as prophetic though previously what sent Joseph away was his hearing the voice of god, no matter how obliquely, or symbolically—the younger brother becoming an example for the older brothers—the seeking and the gaining of forgiveness—of course it is an example, an intense, moving, radically renewing, almost raw, example of family, of forgiveness, of closeness, of the desire for completion, but also all of it, is intensely, forever a homecoming, but Joseph never loses the Egyptian part of himself, he is a citizen of Israel, and his family, and his people, but his land, the province he lives in, Goshen, is carved out of Egypt, and the way that he reads dreams and prophecies has an Egyptian style—remember that his brothers don't recognize Joseph when they first see him in the court of Egypt.
This question of inclusion and excision, of being an alien and being a member of a group, becomes firmer over time, there are rules, conclusions that are reached, so that the call of hospitality is given and so people do not lose their Jewish identity, so they do not become Babylonians, or Egyptians or Canaanites. Joseph becomes a way, in a liturgical sense, an introduction to the problems of the Gospel.
The gospel becomes really difficult for Christians who have a social justice bent, We try to be like Christ here, but Christ here is not the man who says the first will be last and the last will be first, he is not the christ of priority of the poor, or the one who talks about the leveling of inequility—here he uses a racial slur, and worse he tells the woman that she will never be part of the jewish culture “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”--for those of us who are not Jewish, who are not part of the lost sheep of Israel, how do we connect ourselves to the Lord, a Lord who in this passage who has decided to be abandon us---it reminds us that Christ was not a christian, that we as Christians are interlopers for the original message, and that we are not here, like christ, but we are the Caaniate woman, who are begging for a small intervention, a small notice of Grace, from a God who might not have priority for us, or at least at this point in time, in this point in the history of Christ, he was not for us.
In the Anglican tradition, there is a memory, of our base humanity, of our fallen nature, of our inability to fully understand or know the Master and our internalization of our separation from the divine comes from the difficult place where Christ isolates himself from the larger world. The prayer of humble access in the 1662 BCP can be seen as a place where we recognize that we are adapted into this tradition—it is not only our separation from the full glory of god, because of our humanness, it is because we are part of another tradition, a branch that has been transplanted onto the tree of life. Let me read that prayer:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
The prayer of Humble Access is the place where we are exilic, it is a mark of our exilic space.
This is where the epistle provides a place of grace—this fear that we are defiled, that we embody the problem of purity, because the first half of the gospel is about what can defile and what cannot defile, but the purity and the defiling happen at the same time—and just as we cannot presume to come to this thy table, we cannot presume to clean enough, to wash our hands the right way, or say the right words, or to pray sufficiently to be pure, We are Christian because we have agreed to be adopted into the family of Abraham, but we are still strangers in a strange land.
God's understanding, has grown wider, the contract he had with Abraham has grown past the lost sheep of Israel to the dissident members of other places and other tradition. Because we cannot understand God, because we are not perfect, and because God is perfect, because God is beyond time and space, and because we are stuck in our own temporalities, we cannot avoid being disobdienent—this is the exile that we live in, the absence from the divine, the being unable through our own skills, gifts, powers and understanding to receive the Eucharistic cup, the cup that was not taken away from Christ, though he asked.
This is grace and mercy, to be adopted into the citizenship of Israel, not with the awkard rules of hospitality not with the hostile word of Christ who only sought his own lambs, but if we want ot be adopted, if we want to be a member of the Abrahamic covenant, then we can be.
This choice cannot be easy, and we are still exiles from the lord—but there is power in this choice of adaptation, of adoption.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
there does seem to be an uptick in evangelical xians rship to Bunyan.
jenny teller's sci. illustrations are gorgeous, and an excellent way for visual and written info to co-exist. esp. see the jellyfish.
the typography of John Carpenter's the Thing.
hundreds of japanese munciapl flags
compare this with Shelton's Honey Bea, as Brad Shoup did in TSJ, & talk about the implicaitons of list songs on country music.
CAmeron met with Murdochites 26 times in 14 months. Also, read the new yorker's article on murdoch this week.
almost three dozen photos of allnations pow wow in seattle.
W. Chaput the new archbishop of philly, is RAtzinger claiming ideological purity and hard work over innovation and a certain kind of mercy?
i'm back and forth on Romney's LDShood as a liability in 2012, this new study makes me lean into thinking it is a major one.
Trapeze Strip Tease, released by Edison.
Elizabeth ParkeR a domestic worker in 19th century england, was beaten and thrown down the stairs when she refused to have sex with her employer, as a revenge she cross stiched her testimony on a peice of linen.
i spent 12 hours listening to some of the deputations, and watching mamoliti be angry and ford be bord, and i was hoping it would make a difference, now i'm not sure.
Chuck's essay on Eric Church quashed some of my love for it--but then I listened to this:
Sue Tilley who posed for Beneifts Supervisor Sleeping, writes a tender and quite amusing adendum to the offical Lucian Freud obit in the gaurdian.
jenny teller's sci. illustrations are gorgeous, and an excellent way for visual and written info to co-exist. esp. see the jellyfish.
the typography of John Carpenter's the Thing.
hundreds of japanese munciapl flags
compare this with Shelton's Honey Bea, as Brad Shoup did in TSJ, & talk about the implicaitons of list songs on country music.
CAmeron met with Murdochites 26 times in 14 months. Also, read the new yorker's article on murdoch this week.
almost three dozen photos of allnations pow wow in seattle.
W. Chaput the new archbishop of philly, is RAtzinger claiming ideological purity and hard work over innovation and a certain kind of mercy?
i'm back and forth on Romney's LDShood as a liability in 2012, this new study makes me lean into thinking it is a major one.
Trapeze Strip Tease, released by Edison.
Elizabeth ParkeR a domestic worker in 19th century england, was beaten and thrown down the stairs when she refused to have sex with her employer, as a revenge she cross stiched her testimony on a peice of linen.
i spent 12 hours listening to some of the deputations, and watching mamoliti be angry and ford be bord, and i was hoping it would make a difference, now i'm not sure.
Chuck's essay on Eric Church quashed some of my love for it--but then I listened to this:
Sue Tilley who posed for Beneifts Supervisor Sleeping, writes a tender and quite amusing adendum to the offical Lucian Freud obit in the gaurdian.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Women's suffering has often inspired admiration from audiences whose embrace of their tragic heroine can seem like equal parts sympathy and sadism. Those of us who took pleasure in the fruits of Amy Winehouse's inner turmoil now have to acknowledge its ultimate end. As we contemplate this, we can also revel in what was most entrancing about her music: its brashness and utterly engaging power, the upfront expression of a woman who was loud without apology. Her big notes still live.
Anne Power's on Winehouse
Anne Power's on Winehouse
Sunday, July 10, 2011
last auction cycle warhol was responsible for up to a third of revenues from the major houses. The economist explains this, and how it might not be a good thing.
Toronto project for restoring, in aesthetic ways split concrete planter boxes.
it was a tradtion in the 18th century and earlier, in london, of when droping a child into a foundling hospital, leaving it with a bit of spare cloth, here is an onlin eexhibition that explains the practice, and shows some notes and cloths.
120 mid century modern logos.
though Clark Henry's Butch Guide comes from 1982, the masculinity as assumed normal in the gay male community, and the refusal to acknowledge butch asa kind of drag is still ripe for heavey parody.
Bette Davis on Joan Rivers in the mid 80s.
1500 South East Asian Book Designs.
Marvel Hex Codes
Corruption in China is begginning to be seen by the outside world as a major problem--and this comes with the liquidity of capitial, like this telegraph article on officials funnelling 76b out of the country.
minnepolois bus tickets
design treatments for St Bartholemew's church in NYC, including these icons for guild work:
United Steaks of America
some pretty great street shots of Melbourne.
6000 prisoners in California are on a hunger strike.
Zoran Lucic, Wayne Rooney Poster, From the Sucker for Soccer seires, more here:
about 35 of them
original art for Teenage Sex Club, a romance comic from 1951.
some photos of Twombly's styudio from the 70s. The work was shot by Horst for vogue , so they have a solid, well defined glamour, and an explicit fashion for the sake of fashion aesthetics, instead of an art history reportage, but there are some things that are interesting none-the-less. The neo-classical sculpture, are interesting because they suggest a set of translations of classical motifs, as opposed to actual anceint work, and hte amount of white in the space are not unsual, but this picture, with that white and yellow pop cylinder in the midst of dull/patinaed brown bronzes is a metaphor of twombly's work:
sometimes the majestorium provides a useful stop in corruption, but not before Father Corapi, the charasmatic priest in the WEstern US convinced his followers to give him "He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the society." (Sometimes the reporters for the National Catholic Register are a little bitchy.
STeve Anderson is a very angry man. His speeches against women preaching, against what he considers a culture of licentiousness, and against certain cultures of sexuality, and his refusal to engage in the world are notorious. (mostly because he films and uploads his videos on youtube). These photos of baptisms, and the joy he shows in them, complicates the narratives of anger and exhaustion that function as the core of his work.
John Waters Interview about his art practice.
Toronto project for restoring, in aesthetic ways split concrete planter boxes.
it was a tradtion in the 18th century and earlier, in london, of when droping a child into a foundling hospital, leaving it with a bit of spare cloth, here is an onlin eexhibition that explains the practice, and shows some notes and cloths.
120 mid century modern logos.
though Clark Henry's Butch Guide comes from 1982, the masculinity as assumed normal in the gay male community, and the refusal to acknowledge butch asa kind of drag is still ripe for heavey parody.
Bette Davis on Joan Rivers in the mid 80s.
1500 South East Asian Book Designs.
Marvel Hex Codes
Corruption in China is begginning to be seen by the outside world as a major problem--and this comes with the liquidity of capitial, like this telegraph article on officials funnelling 76b out of the country.
minnepolois bus tickets
design treatments for St Bartholemew's church in NYC, including these icons for guild work:
 |
| From Jul 10, 2011 |
United Steaks of America
some pretty great street shots of Melbourne.
6000 prisoners in California are on a hunger strike.
 |
| From Jul 10, 2011 |
Zoran Lucic, Wayne Rooney Poster, From the Sucker for Soccer seires, more here:
about 35 of them
original art for Teenage Sex Club, a romance comic from 1951.
some photos of Twombly's styudio from the 70s. The work was shot by Horst for vogue , so they have a solid, well defined glamour, and an explicit fashion for the sake of fashion aesthetics, instead of an art history reportage, but there are some things that are interesting none-the-less. The neo-classical sculpture, are interesting because they suggest a set of translations of classical motifs, as opposed to actual anceint work, and hte amount of white in the space are not unsual, but this picture, with that white and yellow pop cylinder in the midst of dull/patinaed brown bronzes is a metaphor of twombly's work:
 |
| From Jul 10, 2011 |
sometimes the majestorium provides a useful stop in corruption, but not before Father Corapi, the charasmatic priest in the WEstern US convinced his followers to give him "He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the society." (Sometimes the reporters for the National Catholic Register are a little bitchy.
STeve Anderson is a very angry man. His speeches against women preaching, against what he considers a culture of licentiousness, and against certain cultures of sexuality, and his refusal to engage in the world are notorious. (mostly because he films and uploads his videos on youtube). These photos of baptisms, and the joy he shows in them, complicates the narratives of anger and exhaustion that function as the core of his work.
John Waters Interview about his art practice.
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