Bricolage 3
Third in an ongoing series of links, asides, and quick hits
1.
The second story in Retcon: A Mosaic Story in Three Movements—”Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves”—will be coming out on Sunday (April 9). So you can’t read it quite yet, but you can pre-order it, and I would be quite grateful if you did! It is available on:
And you can also preorder the entire series at once if you like. (It should be available on Apple books eventually, although the page isn’t up yet.)
2.
I should note that I do not, in general, plan to put up two bricolage posts in such rapid succession (the last one only two weeks ago). My plan, as announced and so far kept to, is to roughly alternate “real” essays and lighter fare. As I think of it, bricolage posts are one type of lighter fare; the other sort are posts that are more casually written, self-promoting or navel-gazing than most essays1 — such as my introductory post or my publication announcement. Which is to say, the ideal pattern, in my mind, is something like Essay/Bricolage/Essay/Self-Involvement, so that the bricolage posts are spaced out. It takes time to collect seashells, after all.2
It is also true that, originally, I planned to put up last week’s post today, rather than a week ago, since it was obviously related to events of April 4, and this is the Thursday closest to the date. (Also, thematically, a post about grieving works best for me after an April 4 yahrzeit3 rather than before one.)
Both of these plans have been altered for the same reason: it is Passover—the first seder was last night, and the second seder is tonight—and I expect people will be busy with other things. I would rather put up essays when there is at least a somewhat greater chance people will find occasion to read them. So I am doing another bricolage post.
.jpg){kind=link}
3.
One area of push-back which I—fruitless, no doubt, but then, as Tolkien said was the great wisdom of the North, “defeat is no refutation”—wish to push back against the culture4 is the astonishing shortness of our memory. I am not simply talking here about our lack of engagement with history (although that is not unrelated); it is the way we let sensations and facts and ideas and people flow into and out of our heads like water through a falls. This is one reason I write about old books5 (and there will be more of that next week); it is a reason that the links I give in these bricolage posts are often old. If something is worth reading (and is not about the direct news—not, say, an update on a changing event), then it is worth reading two weeks from now as well as now.
All of which is just preamble to my linking to a tweet (!), that most ephemeral of media, which is from more than three weeks ago:
I think he’s right. I’ve heard this from various sources. And it is as deeply concerning about the fate of our civilization as anything short of climate change can be—as deeply concerning, for instance, as the threats to democracy (which are dire and very concerning!).
I should note that there is a counterpoint: another tweeter points out that while reading literacy has declined, video (and image) literacy has grown dramatically. And I think that’s probably true, too.
But I think that a literate, reading culture is a special way of being human: and one which we have, more than we always bear in mind, built our culture around; and one which what is best in our culture depends upon; and one which is not in any way compensated by an increase in video literacy. Perhaps video literacy is a worthwhile thing in itself; but it compensates for lost reading skill like a free lunch compensates for a lost career. The center, the crucial, is lost. And no invocations of “yeah yeah Plato worried about what writing would do to human memory”, or “people are always panicking about new technology”, or whatever, will detract from Kosko’s essential point: “This is a serious issue. Don’t be dismissive.”
This is not to say that it is an easy problem, or that I know what to do about it. (It would be more accurate to say that it is precisely to say that it is not an easy problem than to say that it is.) I have no answers to offer, save to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Defeat is no refutation.
And just to make clear: the point where I began is not disconnected from where I went. The decline of memory, and the decline of reading, are two strands of a larger web. As the sage said: the medium is the message.
4.
I had never heard of Thomas Traherne (1637? - 1674) until a few weeks ago, but the story of his work is one to give the most underrated writer cheer. He was a theologian, and is still apparently best known in that regard, but he was also a poet. It is the story of his poetry which I find fascinating. An old blog I stumbled on tells the story well:
…very little of his work was published during his lifetime. Vast number of handwritten manuscripts survived his death, however, and many of these remained in the safekeeping of a local family in his native Herefordshire. However, in 1888 the estate of this family was wound up, sold, and the manuscripts became dispersed. Eventually, in 1897, one set of papers was accidentally discovered in a bookstall. Traherne’s first volume of verse was published in 1903 and a second collection followed in 1908. When these poems finally found their way into the literary world they were greeted with astonishment as well as deep appreciation and they were widely influential: TS Eliot was a great admirer of Traherne, as was Dorothy L Sayers.… Over the years further manuscripts have also come to light – literally, in one case, because in 1967 another lost Traherne manuscript was found, on fire, in a rubbish dump and rescued in the nick of time.
Traherne is now counted among the metaphysical poets, along with Donne, Marvell, and George Herbert.
The poem I saw quoted,6 which sent me on the googlequest that ended up teaching me who Traherne was, at least according to the above-cited blogger, one of his more obscure poems, but I liked it a lot. I present it here in full:
Consummation
The thoughts of men appear Freely to move within a sphere Of endless reach; and run Though in the soul, beyond the sun. The ground on which they acted be Is unobserved infinity. Extended through the sky, Though here, beyond it far they fly: Abiding in the mind An endless liberty they find: Throughout all spaces can extend, Nor ever meet or know an end. They, in their native sphere, At boundless distances appear: Eternity can measure; Its no beginning see with pleasure. Thus in the mind an endless space Doth naturally display its face. Wherein because we no Object distinctly find or know, We sundry things invent, That may our fancy give content; See points of space beyond the sky, And in those points see creatures lie; Spy fishes in the seas, Conceit them swimming there with ease; The dolphins and the whales, Their very fins, their very scales, As there within the briny deep Their tails the flowing waters sweep. Can see the very skies, As if the same were in our eyes; The sun, though in the night, As if it moved within our sight; One space beyond another still Discovered; think while ye will. Which though we don’t descry, (Much like by night an idle eye, Not shaded with a lid, But in a darksome dungeon hid) At last shall in a glorious day Be made its objects to display, And then shall ages be, Within its wide eternity; All kingdoms stand Howe’er remote, yet nigh at hand; The skies, and what beyond them lie, Exposed unto every eye. Nor shall we then invent Not alter things; but with content All in their places see, As doth the glorious deity; Within the scope of whose great mind, We all in their true nature find. — Thomas Traherne
Traherne’s work is all out of copyright since, even though it was published over two centuries after his death, it was still long enough ago to be public domain, so you can read more here.
5.
Further items:
Speaking of John Holbo,7 I would be remiss if I didn't point out that he wrote—in addition, presumably, to some philosophy, since they don't hand out tenured seats in that subject based on blog posts, however well-regarded—something which was, in a flurry of links a few years ago, widely described as the best blog post ever. I don't know if I would go quite that far, but it definitely was one of the best blog posts ever, as I noted long before the linkflurry. It’s a bit odd to read today, since it’s a (brilliant, witty and devastating) take-down of David Frum, who has in the years since emerged as one of the few sane members of the conservative movement, which he demonstrated by getting thrown out of it for ideological sins even before Trump went down an escalator. (His exile was over his suggestion that conservatives bargain in good faith over Obamacare rather than simply oppose it blindly.) Yet Holbo’s take-down—which Frum, as far as I know, has never deigned to notice—remains true. Whether that should lead us to conclude that Frum has moderated and improved his views since his mid-90s book, or whether it shows precisely how off the rails the conservative movement is that even so crazy a person should be among its most moderate and reasonable members, is left as an exercise for the reader.
“Inhabiting the order of measured, quantified time, as most of us do, already inhibits our capacity to imagine another way of being in time. Our enclosure within the human-built world, in both its analog and digital dimensions, obscures the markers of alternative temporal orders. It is possible, of course, to frame this as a liberation from the limits of time just as it is possible to frame our uprootedness as a liberation from the constraints of place. And, indeed, it sometimes is just that. But it is also possible that our liberation from older cultural forms, forms which were more directly informed by a place and its time, has been used against us. To be disembedded and desynchronized is also to become subject to the stochastic order of the digital economy.” — L. M. Sacasas, “Whose Time? Which Temporality?”
I always hesitate to link to something fun on Wikipedia, since there seem to be editors over there who are sufficiently self-important and self-serious about the whole project than anything really amusing gets removed, so by drawing attention to it, maybe I’ll end up helping to kill it. Still, I found it rather delightful that Wikipedia has a whole series of articles on themes in The Lord of the Rings. One would just be informative, but a whole series feels marvelously indulgent. Mostly it’s nothing new to people who have, e.g., read Tom Shippey, but I still hope the pages stick around.
(Content warning: Politics). There have been a number of people saying recently that they think that the tide has turned as far as woke discussion-suppressing goes (which is definitely the worst part about it, in my view). There have been a number of examples to point to lately if you’re looking for positive signs. (I’m cautiously optimistic, but it’s hard to tell if these are a trend or just a distortion of the bubble I happen to be in.) But if you like such things, Stanford’s standing by its guns is another one to add to the list.
Finally, in honor of the ongoing holiday, I will link to one of those pieces on my old blog that I do think counts as an actual essay: "A person is obligated to regard himself as if": An Atheist Jew's Reflections on the Seder. Chag Kasher V’Sameach to all those who are observing.
And, y’know, these are essays we are talking about, where causal writing and navel gazing are the center of the genre.
But note that, unlike the alternating of real essays and thinner fare, I make no promises on this score. I have promised, and will do my best to deliver, a real essay every other week. And in the off weeks I shall send… something. If all I have to send is bricolage, why then bricolage it will be.
It is not, technically, a yahrzeit, since a. yahrzeit is done according to the Jewish calendar, not the Gregorian. The actual yahrzeit for Mary Joe Frug is the seventh day of passover—this year, Tuesday, April 11 at sundown to Wednesday, April 12 at sundown. But of course I am an American not just (indeed, by nearly every measure far more than) a Jew, and the Gregorian is the calendar by which I live—and by which my people die. And it is April 4, far more than 21 Nissan, that lives with me.
"What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America.” — Gore Vidal
Some will say, not wrongly, that my describing two book series which concluded in the 21st century as “old books” is symptomatic of the problem. And I agree, I am simply speaking
If we lived in a culture where Aegypt was a young book, I suspect I wouldn’t have to worry about this at all.
Quoted, I should note, by philosopher John Holbo on Twitter, who was in a spate of posting literary quotes misattributed to philosophers in amusing and oddly appropriate ways, who cited the first stanza as having been written by Husserl. But I saw the tweet, as one does, out of context, with no hint it was a parody, and it’s not like I know enough about Husserl to know he didn’t also write poetry, so my first introduction to this work was pretty bizarre.
Some readers, no doubt, are saying to themselves “Huh? When were you speaking of John Holbo?”—but not you, Careful Reader, since you are (as evidenced by your reading of this very sentence) reading the footnotes.