Something like that is the claim of the book reviewed here. I haven’t read Laying Down the Sword, by Philip Jenkins, but the review, by Patrick Allitt, gives a decent summary (assuming it’s not inaccurate). Jenkins’ main concern is to make sense of the depictions of genocidal violence commanded by God in various books of the Old Testament, which after all we have to see as somehow divinely inspired if we don’t want to be Marcionites or gnostics. Jenkins, Allitt writes, offers the following solution:

Jenkins believes that these much later writers attributed to Joshua actions [viz. the divinely ordered massacre of the Canaanites] that never happened. Their motive was to exhort their own contemporaries to live up to the rigors of monotheism and not to let their attention be drawn away by the multitude of other gods, from the surrounding empires and societies, competing for their loyalty. He admits that praising their forefathers for genocide implies that they were familiar with the concept, but takes consolation from the fact that the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not take place.

[...]

What does all this imply for practicing Christians today? In Jenkins’ view, ministers and worshipers should face up to the genocidal texts because they are an integral part of the Bible, whose Old and New Testaments, he believes, depend on one another. He invokes the authority of Martin Luther, who reminded the excitable first generation of Protestant Bible readers not to take any passage out of context, always to think of the overall meaning of a book, and to be attentive to the setting and specifics of a passage. Deuteronomy 7, for example, can then be understood not as a claim that it’s right for Christians to massacre their enemies but as “a call to absolute dedication.” If we continue to ignore or deny these texts rather than face up to them in their proper context, we will be taken by surprise when another fanatic uses them to justify murder.

Sadly Catholics aren’t much better about this; I’ve certainly never heard a homily on “And the Lord thy God shall have delivered them to thee, thou shalt utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no league with them, nor shew mercy to them” (Deut 7:2). (Though I’ve also never heard… well let’s not get into the topic of the quality of Catholic preaching.) These are issues that demand our attention; that’s one of the main reasons I write so much here about violence, agony, theodicy. (If nothing else to come to some understanding of them myself.)

But one reason they demand our attention is that we can’t just say “well the Bible says it but doesn’t really mean it”. As Allitt ends his review:

On the other hand it’s hard to escape the feeling that he is making excuses for the biblical authors. Perhaps it is true that they used the language of genocide only figuratively, but in doing so they gave warrants to people who not only committed actual genocide but claimed God’s blessing for it into the bargain.

[...] That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. [...] It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.

I think Catholics are (or can be) more aware than Protestants of the bloody side of their religion. We do, after all, believe what we drink at Mass to be not fermented grape juice, but Christ’s actual blood. I think that’s why saying that the massacres didn’t actually happen is so unsatisfying. Perhaps they never happened (or at least weren’t as bad as the Bible makes them sound); maybe (probably) Noah’s flood never happened either. Maybe it’s just symbolism. But what do we even mean by that? Our religion is centered around the literal reality of a symbol.

And at times, it’s hard to see what difference it being “just symbolism” would even make make when our religion is about our killing God by nailing him to a tree. Not in mythic time–in history, sometime around 33 AD. Yet not just murdered by some ancient Jews and Romans–murdered by us. We want–need–for him to die because if he doesn’t, we cannot be saved. He is the sacrificial lamb–and before him, sacrifice was always an act of atonement, not what had to be atoned for. Is it now both? Do we commit an act of violence in order to atone for that very same act? What the hell are we doing saying Christianity is a religion of peace? It’s a religion centered around a successful theomachy.

I don’t think anything in the above paragraph is false; it’s simply mysterious. (An open mystery?) At the same time, it can be easy to slip from mysticism to mystification. There’s important differences between Christianity and the various mystery cults that sprung up around the same time centered on the killing of a god.

If the Wikipedia version of René Girard can be trusted, Girard has some interesting ideas about Christ’s death as an unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism and revelation of our complicity in it, and of the two millennia since as the instability that follows from this unmasking as society struggles to come to terms with it. I find these ideas intriguing (particularly Christianity as destabilization) but I have a vague sense that they don’t do justice to the way the Bible makes violence characteristic of not just humanity but also divinity.

In these speculations there’s always danger of heresy (a worry secular readers probably find incomprehensible, but so be it). Still, I’d like to merge Girardian anthropology with that of David Jones (whom some have called a “sacred heretic”), at least what we can extract from his writings. In In Parenthesis Jones makes the WWI soldier into sinner and scapegoat and sacrifice and faithful blasphemer. What I want to say is this: the only successful theodicy would be a kind of theomachy. (Which is, I suppose, one way to read Job.) But I can’t know if I can say that until I can answer, what kind?

—

Three postscripts.

First, I am very open to being challenged on this–more so than with most posts. But quoting the peaceful passages of the Bible can’t settle the matter, since the point is that we somehow have to reconcile the two.

Second, what I’ve tried to suggest here is that one just can’t read Christianity as a religion of peace, not if you take it seriously, not if you understand “religion of peace” to mean something even remotely akin to “religion of pacifism”. It’s a valid question, I think, why one would endorse such a violent religion at all–don’t we all know violence is bad?–but that’s a question for another day. It was actually on that topic that I thought I was writing when I began this, but the prologue ran away from me.

Finally, as you’ve perhaps guessed, I’m most comfortable cutting short the omnibenevolent leg of the stool; I lean towards fudging “freedom” rather than “omniscience” and don’t see how you can reduce omnipotence without it completely disappearing (note: SMBC is amusing but often extremely vulgar so don’t read beyond the one I linked to if you have a weak stomach for that sort of thing).

How do I define the word I’m looking for? It would mean something like “way of seeing the human body as inherently evil”, in its physicality, its animality, in its sexuality. It’s often associated with gnosticism, dualism, and the explicit denial of Christian ideas of sacramentality, but it’s not equal to those; it’s a possible symptom of them. It can manifest as misogyny, specifically what Freud called a madonna-whore complex, but it won’t necessarily do so; it could just lead to asceticism (our body is evil and must be punished!), or hedonism (our body is evil so it might as well enjoy itself!). It’s related to psychoanalytic ideas of repression, but I want a word for the position, not what causes it.

Anyway, for a while now I’ve been using the word “angelism” for this purpose. But that’s not even in the OED, and Merriam-Webster says it means “the regarding of human affairs from an unrealistically sanguine point of view, as though a man were an angel,” which is related to what I’m talking about but not the same–I mean a view that recognizes that man is not an angel and despises the part of him that is not. Now I suspect that behind everyone who holds Merriam-Webster angelism there’s someone who (perhaps unconsciously) holds Ironical-Coincidings angelism, but the reverse is not necessarily true. My use of “angelism” was inspired by Marshall McLuhan, who also uses “discarnality,” but that word has the same problems as “angelism” really–it has to do with (particularly electronic-age man’s) denial of the importance of the body, but not necessarily with hatred of it–but maybe that distinction isn’t worth drawing.

Well, “angelism” doesn’t seem to be in common use, so I guess I’ll keep using it, but I’m not happy. If anyone knows what word I should be using, or wants to dispute that I’m talking about a phenomenon worthy of a name, post a comment.

Another Part of the Heath. Storm still.Enter LEAR and Fool.

Lear. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Fool. O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing; here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool.

Lear. Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ’tis foul.

Fool. He that has a house to put his head in has a good head-piece.
The cod-piece that will house
Before the head has any,
The head and he shall louse;
So beggars marry many.
The man that makes his toe
What he his heart should make,
Shall of a corn cry woe,
And turn his sleep to wake.
For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

Enter KENT.

Lear. No, I will be the pattern of all patience;
I will say nothing.

Kent. Who’s there?

Fool. Marry, here’s grace and a cod-piece; that’s a wise man and a fool.

Kent. Alas! sir, are you here? things that love night
Love not such nights as these; the wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves. Since I was man
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
Remember to have heard; man’s nature cannot carry
The affliction nor the fear.

Lear. Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes,
Unwhipp’d of justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjur’d, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous; caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practis’d on man’s life; close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinn’d against than sinning.

Kent. Alack! bare-headed!
Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel;
Some friendship will it lend you ’gainst the tempest;
Repose you there while I to this hard house,—
More harder than the stone whereof ’tis rais’d,—
Which even but now, demanding after you,
Denied me to come in, return and force
Their scanted courtesy.

Lear. My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That’s sorry yet for thee.

Fool. He that has a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.

Here’s the 2008 Ian McKellan version:

Anyway Cavell has a book about Thoreau’s Walden, which he sees as the unacknowledged foundation of American philosophy and the great American literary epic. I’m currently reading it, and have realized early on that what Cavell sees in Thoreau is just not what I see in Thoreau. But it is almost, though not quite, what I see in Melville.

The best way to bring this out is with a lengthy quotation with my comments interspersed. So, I’m in red.

The writer of Walden establishes his claim upon the prophetic writings of our Scripture by taking upon his work four of their most general features: (1) their wild mood swings between lamentation and hope (because the position from which they were are written is an absolute knowledge of faithlessness and failure, together with the absolute knowledge that this is not necessary, not from God, but self-imposed; and because God’s prophets are auditors of the wild mood-swings of God himself) [or: his despair and presumption]; (2) the periodic confusions of their authors’ identities with the God’s–stuck with the words in their mouths and not always able to remember how they got there [or: his attempt to become God; I also think Cavell is confused here about the prophets (do they confuse themselves with God or just their words with Gods'?) but that's a side issue]; (3) their mandate to create wretchedness and nervousness (because they are “to judge the bloody city” and “show her all her abominations” [Ezekiel 22:2]) [or: their gleeful perversity]; (4) their immense repetitiveness [or: their tedious self-absorption]. [The point here is that each of these is a marker of prophecy, but not a marker of true prophecy. False prophets are all of these as well. I agree Thoreau claims a prophet's mantle, and that these are his way of making the claim; but they don't establish it.] It cannot, I think, be denied that Walden [like Moby-Dick] sometimes seems an enormously long and boring book. (Again, its writer knows this; again it is part of his subject. “An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this” [IV, 22]. He is speaking of the lack of domestic sounds to comfort one in the woods, and he is also speaking of his book. In particular, he is acknowledging that it is not a novel, with its domestic sounds.) I understand this response to Walden to be one not of emptiness but of prolonged urgency. Whether you take this as high praise of a high literary discovery, or as an excuse of literary lapse, will obviously depend on how high you place the book’s value. [I can recall said almost the exact same thing about Moby-Dick.]

So… what then? Obviously I don’t think Melville is a true prophet; I think Melville is misguided about many things. But Moby-Dick still had a deeper effect on the way I think than any other novel (rivaled only by Dostoevsky and Faulkner). I read Walden recently, and I don’t think I felt bored because I couldn’t bring myself to confront the deep issues Thoreau confronts; I felt bored because Thoreau doesn’t sound like a prophet, he sounds like an obnoxiously sincere and self-involved adolescent. Is it, then, just a question of literary taste? I don’t think so. My problem isn’t with Thoreau’s style, it’s with, as Cavell would say, Thoreau’s voice; and more than anything it’s with Thoreau’s (and Cavell’s) insistence on having a voice. (It seems crucial, at this point, to note that in Moby-Dick Melville does not have a voice–Melville is not Ishmael.) Thoreau insists on speaking for himself because ultimately he doesn’t want us to hear what he have to say, he wants us to hear him. But if all he has to say is himself, he says, and is, nothing.

So: I think there is something fundamentally wrong with Thoreau at a much, much deeper level than with Melville. But I also expect Cavell’s analysis to completely leave out what that something is; which means I expect this book to resonate with me on many levels if I just pretend it’s actually about Moby-Dick. The real American epic.

I never know quite how to approach specifically Jewish writers and theorists [1]. I’m often fascinated, sometimes sympathetic, but always fear that if I say I agree with them it will only reveal that I didn’t quite understand what they meant. After all, they explicitly oppose their view to the Greco-Roman-Christian tradition. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that they don’t understand the Roman Catholic position [2]. Rome sees itself as a synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem; that makes it easy for Jerusalem to see us as Athens in disguise, and vice versa. Thinking about this often makes it seem as if Catholicism is inherently schizophrenic.

Anyway, Goldman’s train of thought is as follows: (1) classical music is a distinctive product of Christian civilization; (2) that means it’s usually approached with a Greco-Roman-Christian conception of beauty that Jews cannot accept; (3) but Judaism has its own conception of beauty; (4) and classical music can be seen as beautiful in the Jewish sense.

I have no quarrel with (1) and (4); in fact I particularly like Goldman’s description of teleology in classical music: “”The classical music of the West … subordinates the musical moment to a teleological goal. That is, Western music creates tonal expectations so compelling that the hearer’s perception of the flow of musical time is guided by a sense of the musical future. … The juxtaposition of time on different levels enables the great composers to give us an intimation of eternity, a sense of the sacred in purely musical terms.” I can get behind that [3].

But I’m not sure what to make of (2) and (3). He describes the Greco-Roman-Christian sense of beauty as follows:

[The definition of beauty] is an important issue for Catholics, who believe that an earthly institution, namely the Church, holds the keys that unlock what is locked in heaven. If that is possible, God must make himself knowable in some way to humans, for example, by taking human form. One of these ways is beauty. Adapting Plato, Catholic theology equates the good and the beautiful by making them attributes of God.

A way of putting this, I think, is that in a beautiful work of art, God reveals himself by analogy. That is, by proportion; by harmony. The way the parts of the work relate to one another parallels the way God sits in perfect harmony with himself.

Goldman brings out the flaws in this view through a conversation with a priest who, through the equation of good and beautiful, is led to claim that a work of Mozart’s is not “truly beautiful” because it promotes immorality–and of course it’s absurd to say Mozart is not truly beautiful, right? Well, no, not if you take God to be the only completely beautiful being. Everything else is imperfectly beautiful; and being not-good (in a moral sense) harms that beauty; but it doesn’t destroy it. The piece by Mozart (which I haven’t heard) is surely more beautiful than a disgustingly saccharine gospel song, and better to listen to; it would be better if it didn’t promote immorality (if it does), but that’s a flaw we can look past, especially if it’s inextricable from it’s beauty. The same way Athanasius can be a saint even if he had a bad temper–and in some ways because he had a bad temper, since it aided him in his fight against heretics.

Now for the Jewish definition of beauty to which he opposes this. Here’s the first key paragraph:

But rejoicing in our portion throughout the days of our lives is never quite enough, for eternity is set in our hearts, which is to say that our hearts are set on eternity. St. Augustine paraphrased Kohelet in the opening words of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until we come to you.” We might think of beauty as an intimation of the eternity that God has set in our hearts. God has planted in our hearts the enigma of eternity, which is the same as the mystery of human mortality, and beauty is an intimation of that eternity. We do not say that God is beautiful, for we have never seen his form. For Jews, unlike Christians, beauty is not an attribute of God, but rather a fleeting human perception of God’s action in the world.

So, beauty is teleological; it points towards God. Perhaps we can also call it eschatological?

As for the disagreement with Christianity: at first glance there’s a very slight difference between saying “only God is beautiful, any earthly imitation of his beauty necessarily falls short” and “God is above beauty, and and attempt to make beauty absolute and infinite is idolatrous.” I think both do justice to the absolute transcendence of God. There is a difference, though: the Christian approach says that divine beauty and earthly beauty differ as much as infinite differs from finite, but are of the same kind. In doing so, it allows for the analogical. The Jewish view says beauty only points, it does not parallel.

We might say, then, that the Jewish view embraces the eschatological; the Greco-Roman view (insofar as it’s embodied by Plato’s Forms) embraces the analogical; and the Christian embraces both. As I recall, the “anagogical” includes both as well [4]. We might call them melody and harmony. So is there really a conflict here?

Finally, Goldman’s take on the risks of artistic creation touches on another issue my writing here has been concerned with. I won’t comment, just quote:

This may take the form of awe in the presence of natural beauty, which shows us God b’hadar, as in Tehillim 29. But God has made us his partners in creation, and human artists also can create beauty. The risk of emulating God is great. A king may share in God’s glory, as in the blessing for seeing a king (“Blessed are you, God, King of the universe, who has given of his glory to flesh and blood”), but a king who does not subject himself to the law becomes a monster who arrogates God’s authority to himself. Artists are at risk of the same kind of abuse of power. From the standpoint of Kohelet, idolatry can exist in time as well as images. A musician who fails to acknowledge the fleeting character of beauty becomes an idolater.

—

Notes

[1]: This probably has something to do with my being ethnically Jewish but raised Catholic.)

[2]: I’m talking about Catholics because I am one and because as far as I know a uniquely Protestant understanding of beauty basically doesn’t exist; they either reject it or are carried by their emotional response without any way of making sense of what is happening to them. Is this unfair to Protestants? Maybe.

[3]: I’m also intrigued by his description of what Wagner does, but don’t know enough to agree or disagree: “Where the classical composers subordinated the moment to musical teleology and, in their best moments, evoked sacred time, Wagner set out to destroy time. Whereas classical composition ordered time in the spirit of Christian teleology, subordinating the individual moment to a long-range goal, Wagner set out to undermine the organic unity of classical form.” Now that does sound bad. I don’t want to destroy time. At the same time I can understand wanting to do so. I’d tend to see Wagner as the other side of the Athens-Jerusalem dialectic, so of course I’d want to accept his work as good while saying that there’s something he’s missing, but again, I just don’t know enough.

[4]: I’m reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and have to say, annoyingly scientistic as he is sometimes, I love his description of the anagogical in literature.

Most people know that new health-care regulations in the US mandate that all organizations that provide health-care for their employees have to cover contraception. There is a religious exemption but it’s written narrowly enough that Catholic hospitals and schools don’t qualify, which is a big problem for them–complying with the law requires them to commit acts they see as gravely immoral. What I’m interested in here is this comparison (I don’t read that blog but it’s the source for the meme) between that mandate and a hypothetical mandate that vegetarian grocery stores sell meat–which would, of course, be to make them do something they consider immoral.

Most people who hear that comparison say either “great analogy!” or “no it’s nothing like that!”, depending on where they stood on the issue in the first place. The objections usually revolve around how a meat mandate is unnecessary because 1. no one has trouble buying meat and 2. the government doesn’t have a vested interested in getting people to eat meat, while neither of those are true of contraceptives**.

I have a different objection. The analogy just isn’t, well, analogous. A truly analogous case to the contraception mandate would look like this:

• A group of Jains–who are religious vegetarians–own a grocery store that operates according to Jain principles.
• The store employees are mostly Jain; some aren’t. Same with the customers. But everyone involved knows that this is a Jain grocery store, and most people know that means they don’t eat meat.
• The government doesn’t care what they sell in their Jain grocery store.
• It does, however, care about the well-being of its employees.
• For example, since food is a basic human right, the government has decided that the Jain store has to provide food for its employees, or else pay a fine.
• Since meat is an essential part of a balanced diet, or so say the government’s chosen experts, the Jain store has to include meat on the menu of the in-store cafeteria.
• Since not everyone who runs a business wants to tack on an employee-only cafeteria, most people hire a catering company. It’s this catering company that would actually provide the meat to the Jain store’s employees.

I’m not trying to make a libertarian point here, exactly, but I do find it striking how insane that all sounds. Not just the requiring Jains to do things against their principles; the whole thing. It sounds crazy to say that because people need to eat, therefore their employer has to provide them with food, rather than just pay them a salary with which to buy food.

I find the idea that health care is a universal right, therefore the government must mandate health care coverage, similarly puzzling. After all food is more of a basic human right than health care, not less. And as-is, employees do, for the most part, bring their own food, and the hypothetical outlined above is just not an issue.

Still I’m always wary of espousing overly idealistic reforms (whether traditionalist, libertarian, or socialist in origin). I’m not saying we should go back to the good-ol-days before medical insurance made everything complicated. I’m not trying to say anything, really, other than this: part (though not all) of the reason it’s hard to see the problem here is that collectivized insurance makes responsibility so murky. It’s not A is forced to buy X; it’s A is forced to pay B to give C any of {X…Z} for free, and A isn’t allowed to exclude X from the list. This is where my love of technology conflicts with my love of decentralization.

A thought experiment: if A were allowed to pay B to provide {Y…Z}, and it cost $f less per person than {X…Z}, and then C could pay $g to bump their insurance up to {X…Z}, what effect would that have on the situation?

—

*: The first reason is that this is an important issue–lots of Catholics, of which I’m one, are saying it’s the biggest threat to religious liberty in the US in the last, oh, century?–and so it’s important to be able to think intelligently about it. The second is that the vegetarian analogy intrigues me because the moral status of vegetarianism intrigues me, for reasons I’ve discussed, e.g., here.

**: For the record, I think the best response to the first objection is that you’re not preventing people from acquiring contraception, you’re just not paying for it. They can still buy it on their own if they like. My internet skills tell me that without insurance it costs about $50 a month, which is a lot but not exorbitant–if consequence-free sex isn’t worth that to you, don’t have any. It’s a luxury, the same way eating meat is a luxury. The best response to the second objection is that the government does not have that vested interest. Meaning, it does have a vested interest in reducing unwanted pregnancies, but that there are good reasons to want not to do that using contraceptives, so it has no interest in promoting contraceptive use. But both those arguments presuppose a lot. The question is, how good do those arguments have to be to convince people, not that there shouldn’t be a contraceptive mandate, but that the religious exemption should cover schools and hospitals?

Genesis

I.
Against the burly air I strode,
Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear
Upon the dead weight of the land;
And the waves flourished at my prayer,
The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,
To reach the steady hills above.

II.
The second day I stood and saw
The osprey plunge with triggered claw,
Feathering blood along the shore,
To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: ‘Beware
The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,
The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,
Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,
Forever bent upon the kill.’

III.
And I renounced, on the fourth day,
This fierce and unregenerate clay.

Building as a huge myth for man
The watery Leviathan,

And made the long-winged albatross
Scour the ashes of the sea
Where Capricorn and Zero cross,
A brooding immortality–
Such as the charmed phoenix has
In the unwithering tree.

IV.
The phoenix burns as cold as frost
And, like a legendary ghost,
The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,
Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So the fifth day, I turned again
To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

V.
On the sixth day, as I rode
In haste about the works of God,
With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ’s blood are men made free
Though in close shrouds their bodies lie
Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Though earth has rolled beneath her weight
The bones that cannot bear the light.

He wrote that when still an undergraduate. Apparently he now dislikes it and has moved on to different things–less dogmatic Christianity, more sensuous description, less masculine assertion, more anxiety about the role of violence. In some ways I prefer his earlier work though. The later stuff–what I’ve read of it anyway–is sometimes too self-conscious, too worried about what it’s doing to, well, do anything.

I also like that in this poem Hill talks about salmon, but that might just be my affinity for W.B. Yeats and Cormac McCarthy showing. Cf. “Sailing to Byzantium” and The Road. Masculine authors all.

An interesting thing about this poem, though: when we read it in my modernist poetry class, everyone else thought that the focus on conflict and blood, especially in section I (“Against the burly air I strode”–i.e. striving against God) and section V (“there is no bloodless myth will hold”), made it a rather strange Christian poem, as if we can already see Hill’s unease with writing dogmatically Christian poetry. I thought the focus on blood completely normal–in fact I wish I was the one who had written the line about bloodless myths. What unease there is, I thought, showed through more in the phoenix being made a sign of lifeless, false immortality, since the phoenix is usually a symbol for Christ.

At the same time, when I read this article I was struck by the ways in which soccer and baseball are complete opposites. It’s as if baseball and soccer run antiparallel to one another.

From the article:

There are two reasons, basically, why soccer lends itself to spectatorial boredom. One is that the game is mercilessly hard to play at a high level. (You know, what with the whole “maneuver a small ball via precisely coordinated spontaneous group movement with 10 other people on a huge field while 11 guys try to knock it away from you, and oh, by the way, you can’t use your arms and hands” element.) The other is that the gameplay almost never stops — it’s a near-continuous flow for 45-plus minutes at a stretch, with only very occasional resets. Combine those two factors and you have a game that’s uniquely adapted for long periods of play where, say, the first team’s winger goes airborne to bring down a goal kick, but he jumps a little too soon, so the ball kind of kachunks off one side of his face, then the second team’s fullback gets control of it, and he sees his attacking midfielder lurking unmarked in the center of the pitch, so he kludges the ball 20 yards upfield, but by the time it gets there the first team’s holding midfielder has already closed him down and gone in for a rough tackle, and while the first team’s attacking midfielder is rolling around on the ground the second team’s right back runs onto the loose ball, only he’s being harassed by two defenders, so he tries to knock it ahead and slip through them, but one of them gets a foot to it, so the ball sproings up in the air … etc., etc., etc. Both teams have carefully worked-out tactical plans that influence everything they’re trying to do. But the gameplay is so relentless that it can’t help but go through these periodic bouts of semi-decomposition.

But — and here’s the obvious answer to the “Why are we doing this?” question — those same two qualities, difficulty and fluidity, also mean that soccer is uniquely adapted to produce moments of awesome visual beauty. Variables converge. Players discover solutions to problems it would be impossible to summarize without math. The ball sproings up in the air … and comes down in just such a way that Dennis Bergkamp can pull off a reverse-pirouette flick that spins the ball around the defender and back into his own path … or Thierry Henry can three-touch a 40-yard pass in the air before lining it up and scoring a weak-foot roundhouse … or Zlatan Ibrahimovic can stutter-fake his way through an entire defense. In sports, pure chaos is boring. Soccer gives players more chaos to contend with than any other major sport. So there’s something uniquely thrilling about the moments when they manage to impose their own order on it.

I’m just going to take about baseball in terms of the batter, for now. The batter can never have mistake pile on mistake in this way. Each pitch comes when he is completely prepared, physically if not mentally. Yet he fails the vast majority of the time. Baseball, too, is “mercilessly hard to play at a high level,” but not in the physically exhausting way of soccer. Instead it requires honing absurd skills–swinging a piece of wood at a ball flying at you at 90 miles an hour and hitting it so that it doesn’t land near any of the nine people positioned seemingly at random in the field in front of you–so that you’re better at those things than any of the people trying to take your place.

Soccer too requires acquired skill as well as natural talent, but the skills it requires are, for the most part, tactical. (Running is not a skill. Knowing where you’re supposed to run is.) Baseball requires a great deal of acquired skill just to be able to play the game at all. (If you can’t swing at a pitch because you never learned to ignore the fact that a 90-mph projectile is flying in your direction it’s not just that you can’t play the game well.)

The difficulty of baseball leads to boredom and ecstasy just as does the difficulty of soccer. When baseball gets boring you get “strikeout… pop fly… ground-out… strikeout… strikeout… ground-out…” for hours on end because none of the batters are good enough to even make solid contact. Then Josh Hamilton comes to the plate and swings the bat in a way that looks utterly effortless and the ball travels 490 feet into the upper deck.

But this isn’t quite the same in baseball as in soccer. In both the ecstasy comes when “variables converge. Players discover solutions to problems it would be impossible to summarize without math,” but the problems are different.

Soccer takes an intuitively normal set-up: there’s a field and some people kicking a ball around, trying to get the ball in one goal or the other. The problem comes at a tactical level, and come from chaos, the chaos of how indeterminate this initial set-up really is. The goal is to manipulate the chaos well enough to get the ball into the right goal.

Baseball takes an obviously constructed set-up: nine men on the field, a batter, four bases, he hits the ball the runs counterclockwise around them and tries to get back where he started before they get the ball and tag him with it, but if they catch it he’s out, and he can stop on any base and be safe and then the next batter comes up with him on, and then there’s strike-outs and walks… The problem comes at a mechanical level, in trying to cope with that rigid order. The goal is to make something unexpected happen within that order, to hit the ball where no one expects it, and with any luck it will land on the ground, not in someone’s glove, and you’ll finally be allowed to do something.

The problem of soccer, we might say, is the difficulty of acting meaningfully; the problem of baseball is the difficulty of getting to the point where you can act at all. Soccer is about the possibility of value in a world where anything is possible; baseball about the possibility of volition in a world where only one thing is possible.

Yes, this is a perhaps overly philosophical take on the sports. But sports are aesthetic objects, and all aesthetic objects deal, at some level, with deeper philosophical questions–especially those, like baseball and soccer, that aim for sublimity. (This is why they are boring: sublimity requires preparation.)

And yes, I’ve only been talking about the batter. Focusing only on him is, in a way, like focusing only on the goalie. (In a way, that’s what baseball is: soccer with the goalie as main character.) It might seem, intuitively, as if baseball being about “getting to the point where you can act at all” just isn’t true for the pitcher–he’s not just trying to act, he’s trying to act well enough that the batter can’t act at all.

But consider: originally the pitcher wasn’t supposed to act. He was supposed to be just a cog in a machine, tossing the ball towards the batter because there’s no other way to have a batter, unless you want to play tee-ball. Eventually he started to act, snapping his wrist so the ball went faster and was harder to hit, and eventually they let him throw overhand and throw different kinds of pitches. Now being a good pitcher is mostly about throwing well, and throwing different kinds of pitches, and not losing concentration or patience or confidence. Given those things, there’s not a whole lot of tactics involved. There’s pitch choice, yes, but that’s mostly a game of fake-outs and trying not to be predictable. Pitching, then, isn’t primarily about knowing how or when to act; as with everything else in baseball, those are predetermined–towards the strike zone, and, whenever the batter is ready. The game, after all, won’t progress until the pitch is made. Pitching about being able to take an event, the presentation of the ball to the batter, and make it into an action, the act of pitching.

“Never noticed” isn’t even right. I knew well enough that there was some sense in which they were both related to the letter o. I also knew that lower-case omega was ω, which looked rather like w. But I somehow never put the pieces together. I suspect this is partially because Ω/ω and W/w aren’t actually related. Ω/ω is great-o; the upper-case is an Ο opened up at the bottom and the lower-case is the upper-case flattened out and written in cursive. W/w is actually double-u.

It also would have been easier to see, I suppose, if omicron and omega were the only non-onomatopoeic letter-names in the Greek alphabet. But in fact the majority are polysyllabic, and many have specific meanings. Really modern alphabets, with their not having non-onomatopoeic proper names for letters, are the exception. Most Greek letters come from Phoenician and related languages, where they named their letters for the words they both looked and sounded like. A bit like “alpha bravo charlie,” actually. Except e.g. alpha comes from aleph, the word for ox, and the letter looked vaguely like an ox-head (the letter A still does, it’s just upside down).

But there are still some other Greek letters that have compound names for orthographic reasons. Ε/ε, epsilon, is e-simple, and Υ/υ, upsilon, is y-simple, to distinguish them from digraphs that sounded the same (a bit like calling “i” “i-simple” because “ay” also makes that sound…). Unlike with omicron v omega, I had always wondered why these both had “-psilon” in their name, but had never looked it up. But now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

I suppose most people won’t find this interesting, but for me it’s fascinating to see how easy it is to overlook something. The interest, as it were, is in the threat of boredom. And there’s something rather awe-inspiring about the way the alphabet was invented, even if it is a story I’ve read a thousand times. (It’s also nice to have Wikipedia back online, though I supported and support the blackout. I would have said something here about why but it slipped my mind, and most people who read this probably already know why already.)

Then the last section talks about the group as a whole:

The idea that “the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group [...]. It also helps to explain these writers’ broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed [...] “Here is a sign that you’re not alone” starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today.

Its problem, as a mission statement, is not that it’s symptomatic of our self-help culture; Aristotle saw narrative as therapeutic, too. It’s that it’s not specific enough. Does “the sign that we’re not alone” ultimately refer back to the solitary reader [...] Or does it refer to the author [...] Or does truly great literature point to some third thing altogether?

Well, yes, this is part of the problem. But the problem is Aristotle didn’t see narrative as only therapeutic. And that what he meant by therapy (or, more precisely, catharsis) is not as all what people today mean by it. The problem isn’t that the formulation isn’t specific enough; it’s that it’s not complex enough. Literature can’t be reduced to therapy, no matter how precisely we define “therapy.”

The article goes on to talk about how the group’s novels are insufficient:

This is where “The Marriage Plot”’s titular enjambment of literature and love — those two beleaguered institutions — is so clarifying. Think about it: I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.

So far, our new leading novelists have cleared this second hurdle only intermittently [...] we encounter characters too neatly or thinly drawn, too recognizably literary, to confront us with the fact that there are other people besides ourselves in the world, whole mysterious inner universes.

I basically agree with this. I would say it reflects a failure of mimesis–any literature that doesn’t offer a picture of reality that we can recognize as, well, real, cannot succeed as literature. This doesn’t mean mimesis is the goal of literature; only that it’s a necessary precondition for good literature. Though this is a large and dangerous topic.

In any case, the next sentence, and final paragraph, are saying something worthwhile, but do a rather terrible job of saying it:

These works may delight us, but they do not instruct.

I’m cribbing these words — “delight,” “instruct” — from a 2,000-year-old theory about the purpose of art because they seem today more apposite than ever. Even as you read this, engineers in Silicon Valley are hard at work on new ways to delight you — gathering the entire field of aesthetic experience onto a single screen you’ll be able to roll up like a paperback and stick in your back pocket. It’s safe to say that delight won’t be in short supply, and as long as there’s juice in the battery, we won’t have to feel alone. But will we be alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary “literary fiction” aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It’s just that, if the art is to endure, they won’t be quite enough.

While I agree with much of the sentiment here, this is a terrible way to phrase it. “Delight” does not mean “entertain,” “instruct” does not mean “frame the question”. And literature can’t be just about making us not feel alone. Because not feeling alone just isn’t enough.

But I don’t want to bring in the need for transcendence, so I’ll just end with saying that Cormac McCarthy, to my mind, offers a much better critique of postmodernism and alternative to it than does this “Conversazioni group”. (I’ll also note, though the article doesn’t talk about it, that I’ve come across the word “metamodernism” to refer to their anti-postmodernist position, and it strikes me as a fairly useful term, better than postpostmodernism, though also somewhat ugly.)