Borges' Library

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The Tower of el Quixote

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The Tower 玄武

The Tower of Don Quixote and Spanish history

A Novel to Cross a Desert With

The first tower was built in spring 2017.

It was a narrative totem pole that followed my journey in the footsteps of Don Quixote. What a wonderful thing to reach middle age and know there are countless classics left to read and enjoy. The great el Quixote became the sun around which everything else revolved-- el Escorial and Philip II; Charles V and the two Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand (and in the same breath as the two of them: the Spanish Inquisition and this poignant cookbook, A Drizzle of Honey). There was also Isabella's two sister queens...

Battles were Lepanto (Great reads: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (Roger Crowley) and The Battle of Lepanto (Nanami Shiono) and the Ottoman Siege (post coming). Enemy at the Gate and the Vienna Wood.

My favorite book about Cervantes was by María Antonia Garcés. Evoking Freud, Garcés explores the way trauma can be bypassed in the mind; not experienced directly and instead registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is very compelling. I love her! I love Spain! I love Spanish! I love el Quixote. Very good news to find a new something to fall in love with. 

The Quixote also brought Spanish food and Spanish art into my life. 

Art was Bosch. I am still writing about that, but one book that stood out wonderfully was Cees Nooteboom's A Dark Premonition: Journeys to Hieronymus Bosch 

This is a book I wish I could have written ~~ To see a masterpiece at 21 and then go back and see it again at 82. How has the painting changed? How has the viewer changed? Is it even the same man? Can we moderns access the picture in the way Philip II did? Have our eyes changed so much?

Art was also Velasquez. Thoughts put in this post: Being Alone With Las Meninas (Forgetting Michel Foucault)

Finally, from Ilan Stavans's book on the Quixote, this on Quijotismo

In its full splendor, El Quijote not only has given birth to an adjective but also has become a doctrine, an ideology dictating the way people ought to live their lives. What exceptionalism and the American Dream are to the United States (more about that later), this ideology—Quijotismo—is to Spain and its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its central tenet is the implicit concept of rebellion: paraphrasing Montaigne, to sacrifice one's life for a dream is to know the truth. -- Ilan Stavans 

**Here is my Don Quixote Diary which includes stories from my class at Caltech with Nico.**

 

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Columbus's Southerly Journey

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Despite what we all learned in grammar school, educated people from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages had taken the idea of spherical world quite seriously; with the real question by Columbus’ day being how large the oceans were that separated Europe from Asia. Not unlike the Goldilocks Zone in the search for exoplanets, one of the geographical theories that informed Columbus’ journey saw the world as divided into five regions. The top and bottom were frigid polar areas; and between these two inhabitable zones, stretched a tropical zone, on some maps red hot and inhospitable for all life, but on others imagined as rich in resources.

So people already knew the earth was round when Columbus sailed the oceans blue. But wasn't Columbus sailing west in order to reach the east? Well, that also turns out to be more complicated than we were taught in school-- as I learned in a very large and endlessly fascinating book written by Caltech historian Nicolás Wey-Gόmez about the explorer's southerly journey called, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies.

I came to know of Professor Wey-Gόmez's book after I heard him give a Watson Lecture at Caltech a few years ago. These prestigious public lectures have been put on at Caltech for nearly 80 years and they are always well-attended. And Wey-Gόmez's lecture was no different, as every seat in the house was taken. I should say that I was not predisposed to agree at all with Wey-Gόmez since I had long believed that the Europeans of the Renaissance never expected to find much of anything in those high Atlantic waters where Columbus had set sail. Indeed, the Columbus that Wey-Gόmez spoke about that evening was largely unrecognizable to me. Intrigued, I ordered his book the moment I got home from the lecture. 

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Back in Columbus' day, people held more than one map in their minds. 

First, Columbus had an up-to-date version of the medieval T and O map. You've probably seen reproductions of this. With Jerusalem positioned in the center of the world, the three known continents --Europe, Asia and Africa-- are depicted branching outwards from the center. The continents appear encircled by a great ocean that was the "O" of the map's name; while the "T" was formed by the three great rivers that divided the continents from each other: the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Don (Tanais River).

A tripartite system, each continent was associated with one of Noah's sons, with the sinful one-- surprise-surprise-- being associated with Africa. With East at the top, toward the light of Heaven and Christ, the three continents are shown surrounded by the great sea. Heading West to arrive in the East, then, Columbus would have had reasons to imagine that he had arrived at the easternmost part of Asia. Many of the maps he had studied had indeed showed islands off the coast of Asia, including the coveted spice islands written about by the English knight, Sir John Mandeville, in his book of travels a hundred years before Columbus' voyage.

Wishful thinking must have also played a part in his belief that he had landed in India, since Asia had always been his advertised destination. This was where the riches were thought to lie, and why the islands are still known today as the West Indies.

But why is America not called Columbia --after the man who discovered it?

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Wey-Gόmez, in his book, explains that in addition to the T-O maps, there was another tradition of maps that also held great sway throughout the late middle ages and into the Renaissance. These were maps derived from Ptolemy's book Geography, written in the 2nd century. Ptolemy's Geography was so detailed that scholars believe it must have incorporated first-hand accounts of far-flung geographical features. For example, the Bay of Bengal was described with astonishing precision. One of the maps that Columbus consulted just before his voyage was itself based on the Ptolemaic world map. Created by a German working in Florence named Henricus Martellus, it was considered to be cutting edge for all the modern information that had been incorporated into it. Considered to be "America's birth certificate" the famous Waldseemüller map drew heavily on Martellus, but aimed to add even more up-to-date information, by including "the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others”. 

By “others” he presumably meant Columbus!

He then suggested naming the new land in the southern Atlantic "America," after Amerigo Vespucci, whom the map-maker credited for having discovered it.

Wait... didn't Columbus discover South America?

Disappointed when few believed he had discovered India, Columbus decided to continue his explorations by traveling further and further south.

South? I thought he was trying to sail west to arrive in the east. 

Then, when finally reaching what was clearly a continental landmass in present day Venezuela, Columbus did something very foolish. Instead of telling the world that he had discovered a new continent, he announced that he had found --you know what I am going to say, right?-- the Garden of Eden. And that is how Columbus got scooped by Amerigo Vespucci. This is where the "bumbler" part of his resume comes in. 

Toby Lester in his book about the antipodes and the Waldseemüller map, called this antipodal continent in the unknown part of the world the "Fourth Part of the World." According to a geographical theory dating back to the ancient Greeks, the world was thought to be a sphere divided into five zones or belts. The top and bottom were frigid polar zones. In the middle stretched the tropical zone, on some maps red hot and inhospitable for all life, but on others imagined as rich with resources. There remained two temperate zones. The first was the inhabited world as the ancients knew it; while the other was a terra incognito.

Alfred Hiatt, in his book Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600, documents the debates that occurred about the existence of an unknown continent starting from ancient times and right up to Columbus' journey. Augustine of Hippo adamantly denied this terra incognito. But Cicero firmly believed there was life on the other side of the world; and stated that such was the great distance separating the known and unknown worlds that Rome's dominion could never reach it. Even Rome had its limits, it seems.

For more, see my post on Cicero, Dreaming in Latin

Scipio's Dream in Harper's

Recommended Reading

James S. A. Corey’s Expanse Series (the show is fantastic!)

Carol Delaney’s Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America

Michel Faber’s novel The Book of Strange New Things

Valerie Irene Jane Flint’s The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus

Donald Goldsmith’s Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

Nicolás Wey-Gόmez’s The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies

Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

Alfred Hiatt’s Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes

Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America

Ilan Stavans’ Imagining Columbus

Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel, The Sparrow

Mary Alexander Watts’ Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination

 

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A Novel To Cross A Desert With (From 3 Quarks Daily)

FullSizeRender.jpg-1By, Leanne Ogasawara

When I was a young, I don't remember why, but I scribbled a poem by Osip Mandelstam on a piece of thick, mauve-color Nepalese mulberry paper. And as I wrote it, I thought to myself, "This is a poem to cross a desert with." 

Depriving me of sea, of a space to run and a space to fly,
And giving my footsteps the brace of a forced land,
What have you gained? The calculation dazzles 
But you cannot seize the movements of my lips, their silent sound.
--Osip Mandelstam 1935

I carried this poem around in my wallet for twenty-five years--like an amulet. Looking back, I can only wonder what in the world drew me to it when I was still so young and free-spirited...But in fact, this poem of Russian gulag captivity gave me strength during times of hardship; for contained within those few short lines is a beautiful testament to the great strength that our inner lives have to sustain us...

Fast forward twenty-five years when a forty-five year old woman scrawled one line from another poem on the back of that same mauve-color piece of mulberry paper. This time it was the famous line from Tao Yuanming's poem, Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence:  

採菊東籬下 

A world away in spirit from Mandelstam's poem perhaps. As the poem sums up perfectly the serenity achieved by a life of cultivation --at the end of the hero's journey.

飲酒詩     陶淵明
結盧在人境 而無車馬喧
問君何能爾 心遠地自偏
採菊東籬下 悠然見南山
山氣日夕佳 飛鳥相與還
此還有真意 欲辨已忘言

 

Drinking Wine (#5)--Tao Yuanming
I’ve built my house where others dwell
And yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses
You ask me how this is possible-- (And so I say):
When the heart is far, one is transported
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern fence
And serenely I gaze at the southern mountains
At dusk, the mountain air is good
Flocks of flying birds are returning home
In this, there is a great truth
But wanting to explain it, I forget the words (my trans) 

That line has become a perfect touchstone for the next part of my life; another poem to cross a desert with.  

All this about deserts....

The truth is, if I were really to cross a desert, I would most probably prefer to take a novel--not a poem.

I'm curious, do you have one book that you would happily re-read over and over until the end of time?

I had thought I had a definite answer for myself. My novel of a lifetime has always been The Brothers Karamazov. This changed in an eye-blink when I finally began Don Quixote. Like Karamazov, the Quixote is chock full of philosophical questions that would engage a reader endlessly. And what the Quixote may be lacking in religious truths, it more than makes up for in humor. And indeed, don't we want to keep laughing? The countless droll and surprising images in the book can become like little poems that a reader can carry around with them in their pocket and bring out whenever they want to smile or giggle, or to just plain fall on the floor laughing! I love el Quixote and was not surprised one bit to hear that it is one of the most requested book by the inmates at Guantánamo. (That, according to Quixote scholar Roberto González Echevarría).

As is well known, the great Borges was deeply passionate about the Quixote and returned to the work over and over again --in stories, essays, and poems-- throughout his life. In particular, Borges loved Cervantes' literary devices that worked to undermine literary truth (and notions of absolute truth in general it could be said); indeed, the works of both Borges and Cervantes could be characterized by a playful questioning of something Karl Popper called the myth of the framework. Better explored by Martin Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn, the idea being that what we see as "the world" is no more than a shared cultural, linguistic and ideological framework by which we interpret things. This framework informs --and indeed decides-- not only how we interpret experiences but frames perception itself.

This is to say, we are all enchanted.

Imprisoned in our preconceived notion such that not only are our judgements being compromised but our sensory perceptions themselves are suspect. Thus, Thomas Kuhn famously illuminated this by examining scientific paradigms, coming up with the concept of incommensurability. We know we are in the gripe of a linguistic, cultural or ideological framework when we come up against concepts that simply do not translate (for example, mass and gravitation do not perfectly translate from classical to quantum mechanical schemes; or in Heideggerean terms, saints and sinners no longer show up for us today as meaningful--any more than the ancient Greek concept of a hero would seem a sensible option for a man today). Humans assign meaning and interpret not only the world around them, but their understanding of being itself, so that being is intrinsically embedded within all the shared social and cultural practices by which we have been socialized and through which we understand the world around us (l'existence précède l'essence). So fundamental, it is often unconscious to us as well-- like the air we breathe. Foucault used Heidegger's concept of the clearing to explore what he called the episteme. This was always Foucault's primary interest: to try and grasp the a priori network or grid of meaning that we map onto the world. 

My Don Quixote professor called this grid of meaning the "rules of the world."

I love that expression.

Cervantes gives us a fiction. But he also always gives us the rules, says the dear professor.

And, it is in the recognition that reality is a cultural construct and that all narratives have rules by which we can--in this recognition--  take a stand. [the existential stand]. 

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Just amazing that Cervantes was exploring something so modern over four hundred years ago!

But Cervantes was not any ordinary writer! Indeed, has any writer had as adventurous a life as Cervantes? 

First of all, he was at the legendary Battle of Lepanto. Yes, you heard me right. And there, by all accounts, he was very heroic. Hit three times by harquebus fire, he was struck twice in the chest and once in the left hand. Luckily, his armor deflected the chest wounds, but his left hand was permanently damaged during the battle. His maimed hand earned him the nickname, "El Manco de Lepanto." His heroic service that day got him several letters of commendation; one being from "his serene highness" Don Juan himself. Unfortunately, these letters were on his person when he was captured by the dreaded Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. . His new master, believing him to be a man of great value because of these letters, set an exorbitant ransom, prolonging his captivity to five hopeless years.

I wonder whether returning home, he struggled with resuming normal life. I had trouble readjusting to life in the US after my decades abroad. It can be very hard coming home because things that you once thought as being "obvious" or "natural," no longer feel that way and you find yourself questioning everything. Cervantes does this in the novel by pitting all manner of preconceived notions and narratives against each other--even calling into question the act of storytelling itself. Is Don Quixote mad or is the world mad? Are all those notions held by people in various times and places somehow "real" or are we all not bewitched like actors playing parts in a wondrous play?  One of the most eye-opening techniques that Cervantes uses to highlight the role of narratives in our lives is his use of interruptions. I was surprised by how modern they feel-- the way chapters and situations simply trail off, and all the interpolated tales--not to mention the way the main story is abruptly paused by a complete novella plopped into the middle of the first book! Just as a reader is being lulled into a certain worldview, Cervantes adroitly yanks the rug from beneath our feet! As if to say,

See how good I am at this? But be wary, dear reader, for this too is only another narrative and you shouldn't be too trusting. Step back and take a stand on everything!

FullSizeRender-28María Antonia Garcés is one of my intellectual heroes, and she wrote a book about Cervantes' years in captivity in Algiers. Evoking Freud, she discusses the way that in some people trauma is actually bypassed in the mind: it is not experienced directly and instead is registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is very compelling.

Writing this two days after the Florida school shooting on Valentine's Day, I was thinking of this very sobering article by Umair Hacque that was shared widely, including at 3 Quarks Daily. Echoing another friend of 3 Quarks, Anis Shivani, who also has written about the futility of trying to repair a situation that has deteriorated this badly, Hacque gives real reasons for despair. It is starting to feel like a complete societal collapse, since we are not even protecting or doing right by our own children (we are the most dangerous wealthy country to be a child ). Umair Hacque ends his piece by suggesting that, 

We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.

I agree!

Both Descartes and Cervantes were interested in the notion of being "bewitched." In this state of slumber we do not question “the world”, instead accepting that what we know as real is truth and cannot be replaced with an alternative, better, saner world. The rules of our problematic world are built into the very language we use to talk about it, trapping us unless we break out of our own narrative prisons. As Amitav Ghosh tells us concerning climate change, we cannot tell the story of how to make a better world using a language that was built word by word on the framework upon which the problems are built. Interruptions can begin to distance us from the current narrative.

Humor and playfulness can also be very effective. As can be immersing oneself in a different language or culture to help see the world with new eyes. I might have mentioned the sabbath movement here. Spearheaded by Columbia Theological Seminar professor Walter Brueggmann and inspired by the Jewish sabbath, it is a movement to set aside one day where you interrupt the current model of human beings as producers and consumers (I think this is what Heidegger would say we are bewitched by) and try to do things in a different way. It is an effort to step out of the Matrix. In our house the aim is to not work or be consumers; and to just play for an entire day every Sunday. Our day usually involves cocktails at lunch and a homemade dinner with candles and listening to music... we try to avoid computers and cell phones and resist all the things we have become. No amazon, no streaming, no heavy-duty industrial food.... It is enlightening to realize how hard it is to do this. In fact, when I see how challenging it is for me to live in a simpler way (the way I lived thirty years ago), I realize how much I have drunk the Koolaid.

One of my presumably non-religious friends on Facebook shared this article about the Anglican church encouraging Lent be used to step out of our current mindless use of plastics. He said this:

This looks like a neat example of how religion might do what it does best and encourage virtuous behaviors among its members and perhaps model that behavior for society at large. I’ve always thought that Lent has such potential for critiquing our consumer society—and here is an environmental twist. Maybe we should all try it—religious or not. Check out the Lent calendar link in the article. It is very cool.  

It is very cool! Many traditional calendars have these kinds of feast and fast days and also days of abstinence. They are very helpful in attempting to combat 24/7 consumerism, where everyday is Christmas. In any case, it's harder than it looks from here. I can say, it was orders of magnitude easier in Japan (where the average citizen has 1/4 the carbon impact that the average American has, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists). And with this in mind, I think Cervantes is right that interruptions can be the first step to taking a stand in life; for as Einstein might have said: We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Or better

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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Much gratitude to Nicolás Wey Gómez for teaching me so much about the Quixote.... 感謝! 

María Antonia Garcés' Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

My Goodreads review of A Captive's Tale is here. 

For more, see my: A Poem to Cross a Desert With  &

ARE WE DERANGED? (GLOBAL WARMING PART 2)

Also, if you are interested in the Quixote, please see my (and the Puppy-Librarian Senor Borges') Don Quixote Diaries 

What to Give up for Lent? Plastics! Lenten Calendar

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Monsignor Quixote

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Monsignor Quixote has become my absolute favorite Graham Greene novel. I also LOVED the movie with Alec Guinness as Quixote and Leo McKern, of Rumpole fame, plays Sancho! Made in 1987--the film was absolutely brilliant! The back of the book has states this as, Greene's last religious novel, "A whimsical meditation on faith and doubt and the varieties of human folly." It is certainly that. The introduction suggesting that this book acts out the secret of Travels with my Aunt (currently reading for my bookclub); that is, that travel is the great catalyst for change. And that "a life that moves, moves..."

Travels with my Aunt is the only book that Greene declared he wrote totally and completely for fun. As such, the ideas are not explored in depth and there is a zany aspect about Travels—like an old-fashioned caper film. By the way, this was also made into a great movie with Maggie Smith. First, for anyone who wasn’t crazy about Travels, I will say that Monsignor is simply orders of magnitude better—both the book and the movie! But that said, Travels with my Aunt is great fun.

If some reviewers had trouble with the caper aspect of the novel or with the transformation of Henry, well, I would say that is the point. I recently sat in on a class with undergraduates reading the 400 year old novel, Don Quixote. The younger people did have trouble with the scrapes Quixote gets into and said it was unrealistic and suggesting he was evil or an anti-hero in some way. What would they think if they knew that some of the greatest philosophers and thinkers—from Dostoevky to Kierkegaard and Unamuno considered him to be a Christ character? Quixote resists the status quo and the evils we forget are there and he sets out to “right wrongs.” Travels and Monsignor do no such thing but the borrowing from Cervantes is quite clear. Greene hated mundane domestic life. This is quite clear and for Greene mortgages, marriage, kids and the bourgeois life not only held no appeal but he was quite repelled by it. And he is not the only one. What kind of life is really open to those who want to live in a different way?

Probably more than anything, what Greene best captured from DQ was the Kierkegaardian (and Unamuno's Imitation of our Lord Don Quixote) aspect of Cervantes' novel. Kierkegaard's knight of faith's faith is founded on doubt. A knight of faith, according to Kierkegaard, dares to have faith and in this way, in his rejection of ordinary life (and the rules of ordinary life, to borrow professor's phrase), he appears mad or a fool. Folly as a crossroads between two kinds of reality? Relativity?

“Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.”
― Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote

Graham Greene, like Chesterton and Waugh, was a famous convert to Roman Catholicism. And as such, they are keenly aware of the way doubt functions in faith. To paraphrase Greene: one can emphasize doubt or faith, but most people have both. And watching the film, I was reminded a lot of Emanuel Carrere's fascinating meditation on this subject of faith and doubt, The Kingdom. It was my favorite book of 2017.

Anyway, for whatever reasons some of my favorite novels have been written by converts, and this must include Carrere. I am not sure why this is but I have my suspicions, since conversion can be a form of rejection. It certainly was for Greene and Waugh and Chesterton. Deborah Baker has a wonderful book that I highly recommend about convert to Islam Maryam Jameelah called, Baker, Deborah (2011). The Convert, A Tale of Exile and Extremism.

The ending, when Monsignor celebrates mass without any vessel or host was incredibly moving and reminded me so much of Babette's feast. One of my favorite stories and films of all time... to be transformed by joy and love! And both films, coincidentally, were made in the same year...

 

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Playing Around in Don Quixote (Week 7)

Playing around“When God plays, a world comes to be.”--Heidegger

One of the students in class last Thursday was perplexed by the treatment that Don Quixote got from his friends.

"They trick him and put him in a cage and then let him get beaten up! Do they care about him or not?" 

One of the most unnerving things about being in a room with young people is that they react to things so differently than I do. And not just that ~~~because they react to things in a way that I don't think is even possible for anyone my age. Have things changed that much? 

I raised my hand, and I told them that returning to the US after two decades away, I felt that humor had really changed while I was away. People don't play pranks anymore. Sure there is humor but it is more ironic and self-reflecting. I told then about the time when I was a kid and my dad left a message on our answering machine saying, "Kathy and our two ugly daughters are not home right now..." That was funny back then! (The students looked worried). My childhood was filled with pranks! Professor Wey-Gomez said his was as well, and he told them about how he would hide in a corner in the house and read a book waiting for hours for someone to walk in so he could scare them! I suppose we are too busy now? Too busy for pranks?

And what about Nerval's lobster? I am all for taking tortoises (and lobsters) on a walk and letting them choose the pace!

Heidegger felt that it was only through play that human beings could be "released" (gelassenheit) from their relentless will to impose their subjective categories on things and to legislate the way things must be-- for he lamented that the entire history of Western metaphysics was a history of rational prescriptions about what Being must be. In this way, I imagine that Heidegger would not have been at all surprised to hear me complain that "play has disappeared."

Of course, there is no room for "play" in our world now, because nowadays everything must somehow become under our human control-- in Heideggerean terms, everything has become a resource to be used, even our own lives. Every moment must be used efficiently and replacing play we now have amusements which are in many ways aspects of "work" (since amusements are taken up with consumption and are themslves means not ends). The great Dutch scholar Huizinga, who wrote the most charming essay on the play-function of all time, also positioned archaic play in contrast to the modern condition of prosaic efficiency, utilitarianism and "the hell of the literal."

In this way "God is dead" is also to suggest that play is dead-- in our age of efficiency, consumption and earnestness.

Professor says he also wholeheartedly grieves about this. Me too. 

लीला

More on 3 Quarks here.

 

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El Cid and Ein Karem (Week 7)

AlegraOn the outskirts of Jerusalem (also known to some as the center of the world), there is a magical hotel where all the rooms are named after famous lovers. Like paradise, there a wonderfully fragrant garden with comfortable chairs for reading and napping; and if you climb up the stairs to the roof, the views stretch all the way across the valley to the golden onion domes of Gorny Convent, gleaming against a background of pine and cypress trees. And there, every night at precisely at 8pm, the guests find their way back inside the building. Made of cool Jerusalem stone, the walls are adorned with brightly-colored contemporary art. Entering the dining room, the guests all sit down to dinner together.

Ah, hotel Alegra. 

I had requested the Dante and Beatrice room--but was informed that that would cost more!!! So, we settled into el Cid and Jimena. Despite my definite preference for Dante and Beatrice, our room was absolutely unforgettable. And ever since, I've found myself quite interested in el Cid and his lady. Of course, if you watch the famous movie--and you should-- you would be made to think that el Cid was a great fighter of moors; an early hero of the reconquista in Spain. But that is simply not the case.

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Still reading everything I can get my hands on about Spain and al-Andalus, I just finished reading, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, by Jerrilynn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, Abigail Krasner Balbale. I am a big fan of  María Rosa Menocal's work; and while this book is not as beautifully written as her others (writing is a bit dull), it is filled with the most gorgeous photographs of cathedrals and mosques and contains many wonderful poems. A celebration of al-Andalus in stories and pictures, the book has a jewel-like quality! And the way the authors re-tell the el Cid legend is just what the doctor ordered for clearing up all the misconceptions about this famous hero. For el Cid fought for whoever was paying. He fought for the Muslim emirs of al-Andalus but he also fought for the Christian kings of future Castille. I wouldn't say he was out for money alone, but he certainly was not moved by religion or ideology, as much as for land and friendship. His nickname itself is from Arabic. 

Alegra-boutique-hotelBefore Isabella and Ferdinand, religion and language was much more porous for people in Spain. One of the first times Cervantes pulls the rug out from beneath his readers' feet was when he informs us that the manuscript of this true history of the Hidalgo Don Quxoite was written by a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. As Professor Wey-Gomez explained, Benengeli, was nothing if not a "hybrid creature and product of the frontiers!" The "Arabic and Manchegan author" wrote in something we are told might be Arabic; for it then had to be translated by a morisco that the "narrator" happens to meet in the markets of Toledo (translation capital of the world at that time).

A translation!

A translation of a partially completed manuscript written in Arabic by a Moor. 

Cervantes himself lived captive as a slave kidnapped by Barbary pirates in a land ruled by the infamous Hayreddin Barbarossa. Barbarossa was a Greek-born Muslim convert who rose to rule over Algiers. The Ottoman empire is well-known for its incredible porosity. If a person converted and learned the language, they could rise to the very top. And this was so to a lesser extent in North Africa and in al-Andalus. People paid a tax and would be left to live how they saw fit. They could worship in churches and synagogues and were allowed to intermarry. Like in the Ottoman empire, Muslim-ruled Spain was surprisingly multi-cultural--and if one converted to Islam they could rise to the very top. 

Al-Andalus lasted for 700 years. If we can say anything, it is that the culture of Spain from 711- 1492 was much more open than what came before or after it. People did learn each other's languages and they converted to each other's religions. Cervantes book is filled with converts.

There has been some push-back against an overly idealized version of al-Andalus. But as Harold Bloom said in the introduction to María Rosa Menocal's other book, Ornament of the World, this is a necessary idealization; one from which we can learn a lot, I think.  

With that in mind that we have much to learn, I just finished another book about multi-cultural Islamic Spain, called A Vanished World, by Chris Lowney. Interesting on so many levels, the author was a one-time Jesuit seminarian who went on to work for JP Morgan as a managing director. He did the Compostela pilgrimage to raise money for Catholic charities and indeed is an active philanthropist. His treatment of the Saint James story was especially compelling, I thought (and as a pilgrim himself, he was very moving on the camino). As is well-known from the New Testament, Saint James was the first Christian martyr and died back in Jerusalem not all that long after Christ was crucified. So, how did he get to Spain? There is a myth that a shepherd was drawn by a field bathed in heavenly light (compostela means "field of stars") and discovers the tomb of the apostle James. Impossible and yet the pilgrims would come. For a story had been born that the body of Saint James, after martyrdom in Jerusalem, had been placed in a ship made of marble (!) and ended up in Spain, which was at the time considered to be the end of the world. (For Jesus told James: You shall be my witness to the end of the earth). 

The myth was forgotten but then resurrected when Charlemagne had a dream (like Constantine had a dream). Saint James appeared to him and instructed him to follow the milky way, where he would uncover-or deliver-- his grave. This legend would be more martial than the earlier story of the shepherd (whose story recalls the nativity); and would become the origin of the Saint James the Moor Slayer, screamed by knights on the battle field during the reconquista. Like Spain itself, the legend of Saint James went from a story of peace and harmony to a battle cry, and this also shares much with the legends about el Cid. The book started and ended with the 2004 bombings in Madrid since we are repeating the same things again and again.

 

Video from our stay in Ein Karen below. 

(Also we are going to have to immediately take a second trip to Spain, I see... )

 

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The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote

FullSizeRender.jpg-1Yesterday, in a post at 3 Quarks Daily, I declared that Don Quixote was a novel I could cross a desert with. Long ago, I once asked whether a friend had just one book that he would happily re-read over and over until the end of time? I had thought I had a my own definite answer to this question; for my "novel of a lifetime" has always been The Brothers Karamazov.

This changed, however, in an eye-blink when I finally began Don Quixote.

Like Karamazov, the Quixote is chock full of philosophical questions that would engage a reader endlessly. And what the Quixote may be lacking in religious truths, it more than makes up for in humor. And indeed, don't we want to keep laughing? The countless droll and surprising images in the book can become like little poems that a reader can carry around with them in their pocket and bring out whenever they want to smile or giggle, or to just plain fall on the floor laughing! I love el Quixote and was not surprised one bit to hear that it is one of the most requested book by the inmates at Guantánamo. (That, according to Quixote scholar Roberto González Echevarría).

But of course, my two favorite books are connected. So deeply did Dostoevsky love the Quixote that he wrote his own version of the story, in his novel The Idiot. This below is from a letter Dostoevsky wrote from Geneva to his niece as he was working on the book:

The main idea of the novel is to present a positively beautiful man. This is the most difficult subject in the world, especially as it is now. All writers, not just our, but European writers, too, have always failed whenever they attempted a portrait of the positively beautiful. Because the task is so infinite. The beautiful is an ideal, but both our ideal and that of civilized Europe are still far from being shaped. There is only one positively beautiful person in the world, Christ, and the phenomenon of this limitlessly, infinitely beautiful person is an infinite miracle in itself. (The whole Gospel according to John is about that: for him the whole miracle is only in the incarnation, in the manifestation of the beautiful.) But I am going too far. I’d only mention that of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote. But he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous. Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick (who is, as a creative idea, infinitely weaker than Don Quixote but still gigantic) is also ridiculous but that is all he has to captivate us. Wherever compassion toward ridiculed and ingenious beauty is presented, the reader’s sympathy is aroused. The mystery of humor lies in this excitation of compassion.

"This excitation of compassion"

It has been so interesting sitting in on a class on the Quixote with 25 undergraduates at Caltech. They do not seem overly impressed by the hero's idealism--and indeed rather than a hero, one even referred to him as an anti-hero. They are concerned about the havoc he wrecks and the people he hurts. They also worry about his influence on Sancho. This has been very strange. Certainly DQ is no Odysseus. He is not even an Aeneas. But wouldn't they be surprised to learn that it was not just Dostoevsky who considered Don Quixote as a "Spanish Christ." No lesser figure than the great Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, declared him to be likewise so.

To paraphrase Kessel Schwartz: like Christ, Don Quixote went out into the world with his disciple, where he was persecuted; "not so much for his beliefs but for what he thought of as the Kingdom of Heaven." He was ridiculed for trying to tend to the needs of men.

Luke 4:18-19 King James Version (KJV)
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised...

I think the students would be shocked by this because, strangely, they do not seem to see him as a hero. He does cause a lot of trouble along the way...it's true.

**

Simon Leys had a wonderful essay in the NYRBs a million years ago, called The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote. A great piece, I highly recommend it to you!

Would love to get a copy of Unamuno's book, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Below from Ley's wonderful essay:

His main argument, which he sustained, tongue in cheek, over more than four hundred pages, is that Don Quixote should be urgently rescued from the clumsy hands of Cervantes. Don Quixote is our guide, he is inspired, he is sublime, he is true. As for Cervantes, he is a mere shadow: deprived of Don Quixote’s support, he hardly exists; when reduced to his own meager moral and intellectual resources, he proved unable to produce any significant work. How could he ever have appreciated the genius of his own hero? He looked at Don Quixote from the point of view of the world—he took the side of the enemy. Thus, the task which Unamuno assigned to himself was to set the record straight—to vindicate at last the validity of Don Quixote’s vision against the false wisdom of the clever wits, the vulgarity of the bullies, the narrow minds of the jesters—and against the dim understanding of Cervantes.

In order fully to appreciate Unamuno’s essay, one must place it within the context of his own spiritual life, which was passionate and tragic. Unamuno was a Catholic for whom the problem of faith remained all his life the central issue: not to believe was inconceivable—and to believe was impossible. This dramatic contradiction was well expressed in one of his poems:

…I suffer at your expense,
Non-existing God, for if You were to exist,
Me too, I would truly exist.5

In other words: God does not exist, and the clearest evidence of this is that—as all of you can see—I do not exist, either. Thus, with Unamuno, every statement of disbelief turns into a paradoxical profession of faith. In Unamuno’s philosophy, faith ultimately creates the thing it contemplates—not as subjective and fleeting autosuggestion, but as an objective and everlasting reality that can be transmitted to others.

And finally it is Sancho Panza—all the Sancho Panzas of this world—who will vouch for this reality. The earthy Sancho, who followed Don Quixote for so long, with skepticism, with perplexity, with fear, also followed him with fidelity. Sancho did not believe in what his Master believed, but he believed in his Master. At first he was moved by greed, finally he was moved by love. And even through the worst tribulations, he kept following him because he came to like the idea. When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found that he had inherited his Master’s faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease—through the contagion of fidelity and love.

Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die.

Thus, in the madness of Don Quixote, Unamuno reads a perfect illustration of the power and wisdom of faith. Don Quixote pursued immortal fame and a glory that would never fade. To this purpose, he chose to follow what would appear as the most absurd and impractical path: he followed the way of a knight errant in a world where chivalry had disappeared ages ago. Therefore clever wits all laughed at his folly. But in this long fight, which pitted the lonely knight and his faithful squire against the world, which side finally was befogged in illusion? The world that mocked them has turned to dust, whereas Don Quixote and Sancho live forever.

 

 

 

 

 

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Ilan Stavans on Quijotismo

IMG_2514
On Quijotismo

In its full splendor, El Quijote not only has given birth to an adjective but also has become a doctrine, an ideology dictating the way people ought to live their lives. What exceptionalism and the American Dream are to the United States (more about that later), this ideology—Quijotismo—is to Spain and its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its central tenet is the implicit concept of rebellion: paraphrasing Montaigne, to sacrifice one's life for a dream is to know the truth. -- Ilan Stavans 

 

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A Captive's Tale

FullSizeRender-28Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale
by Maria Antonia Garcés

Has any writer had a more adventurous life than Cervantes?

First of all, he was at the legendary Battle of Lepanto. Yes, you heard me right. And there, by all accounts, he was very heroic. Hit three times by harquebus fire, he was struck twice in the chest and once in the left hand. Luckily, his armor deflected the chest wounds, but his left hand was permanently damaged during the battle. His maimed hand earned him the nickname, "El Manco de Lepanto." His heroic service that day got him several letters of commendation; one being from his "serene highness" Don Juan himself. Unfortunately, these letters were on his person when he was captured by the dreaded Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. His new master, believing him to be a man of great value because of these letters, set his ransom to an exorbitant amount of money, thereby ensuring he stayed a captive for five years, most of which he felt hopeless for ever being ransomed!

Returning home, I wonder if he didn't struggle with trying to fit back into life there. It can be very hard coming home after an intense period abroad because things that you once thought as being "obvious" or "natural," no longer feel that way and you find yourself questioning everything. Cervantes clearly does this in a different way by basically pitting all manner of preconceived notions and narratives against each other--constantly calling into question the act of storytelling itself. Is Don Quixote mad or is the world mad? Are all those notions held by people in various times and places somehow "real" or are we all not bewitched like actors playing parts in a wondrous play?

María Antonia Garcés is one of my intellectual heroes. And her book, Cervantes in Algiers is revelatory. Evoking Freud, she discusses the way that in some people trauma is actually bypassed in the mind: it is not experienced directly and instead is registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is is very compelling.

This is an award-winning book for good reason. The opening chapters on the history of Algiers and the Barbary pirates is very interesting. I don't think I have ever read this history before and after going through her two opening chapter twice, I learned so much.

This book is very dear to me. Eye-opening on the history of the time, you will learn more than you imagine on Cervantes life. But, I would add, it is what she has to say about the life-saving grace of literature and about trauma that moved me tremendously.This is an interesting article on her work from BBC culture... and I am posting at 3Quarks Daily tomorrow on it as well. 

[First posted at Goodreads]

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El curioso impertinente (Week 6)

FullSizeRender-9Dropped smack in the middle of Part One of Don Quixote is the "exemplary novella" El Curioso Impertinente. Grossman translates this as The Novel of the Man Who Was Recklessly Curious. I am not crazy about that translation. Not that I am second-guessing the great and glorious Edith Grossman--nor to suggest that I can read Spanish, even!!-- But I probably would have kept this closer to the original:

A Novella of Reckless Curiosity

++

Curiosity has an interesting history in the history of ideas, which I became very interested in two years ago while sitting in on a history of science class at Caltech. Though it has become one of the greater goods in our society-- with parents encouraging their children to demonstrate curiosity and especially around Caltech, curiosity-led research is the kind of ultimate Good, it was not always held in such high esteem. In fact, in the long history of philosophy, curiosity was considered to be a vice, rather than a virtue. There was a time when children were not encouraged to ask too many questions as being curious had much in common with gossip and slothfulness (lack of a disciplined mind).

There is a wonderful essay on the history of "curiosity" by Latin scholar PG Walsh, called The Rights and Wrongs of Curiosity (Plutarch to Augustine). In the essay, he discusses the spiritual dangers of curiosity; indeed it was considered as being a serious vice going back in time all the way to the ancient Greeks (akin to hubris and lack of restraint). While Walsh mainly examines curiosity in terms of Plutarch and Augustine, in fact the topic itself encompasses a long history that spans in time from Apulius' Golden Ass all the way to Pascal. As I said, that something can be wrong with "curiosity" seems incomprehensible to modern Americans. And yet, the idea that this idle seeking of knowledge about anything and everything is an impiety-- and worse a perversion-- goes all the way back to Aristotle at least. So much was it derided that Walsh is surprised it never made it into the top seven of seven deadly sins.The standard reason given for this is that the seven deadly sins themselves derive from eastern monasticism and that the western formative figures of Augustine and Ambrose were bypassed in this particular sin. But it does have all the hallmarks of the others, in terms of being a perversion or lack of restraint of something. Like lust or gluttony, it is a kind of unrestrained questioning--not leading to God but toward idleness.

Below is a long excerpt with commentary as illuminated in Catholic philosophers Josef Pieper's wonderful book on virtue. (My book is called, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart but he has another famous one on the four cardinal virtues).

In the book, Pieper rightly sets up the following contrast between curiositas (curiosity) and what he calls "studiositas." And remember that all the vices were kinds of persions: perversions of love or appetite; perversions of eating or knowing. Curiositas is a kind of unrestained perversion of sight or knowledge.   

Curiositas vs. Studiositas


[The original meaning of sight and its distortion]

There is a lust for seeing that perverts the original meaning of sight and casts a person into disorder. The meaning of sight is the perception of reality. However, the “lust of the eye” does not seek to perceive reality but rather just to see. Augustine notes that the “lust of the palate” does not attain satisfaction but only results in eating and drinking: the same holds true for curiositas (curiosity) and the “lust of the eyes”. In his book Sein und Zeit (Being and time), Martin Heidegger says, “The concern of this kind of sight is not about grasping the truth and knowingly living within it but is about chances for abandoning oneself to the world.”

[The root of the distortion]

The degradation into curiositas of the natural desire to see can thus be substantially more than a harmless confusion on the surface. It can be the sign of one's fatal uprooting. It can signify that a person has lost the capacity to dwell in his own self; that he, fleeing from himself, disgusted and bored with the waste of an interior that is burnt out by despair, seeks in a thousand futile ways with selfish anxiety that which is accessible only to the high-minded calm of a heart disposed to self-sacrifice and thus in mastery over itself: the fullness of being. Since such a person does not truly live out of the wellspring of his being, he accordingly seeks, as again Heidegger says, in the “curiosity to which nothing is closed off”, “the security of a would-be genuine ‘living life’”.

[The effects of the distortion]

The “lust of the eyes” reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative power at the point where it was constructed for itself a world in its own image and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind this papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a “world” of at most one-day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through; a world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair.

[The heart of the problem; a "summary", if you will]

Still, the destructive element of this disorder, born out of and shaped by illness, is found in the fact that this disorder obstructs the original power of man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to attain his own self but also to attain reality and truth.

[The cure]

If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable tempation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudo-reality of empty sounds and sights---in order that, through and only through this ascetism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.

 Romans 12: Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

--Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, pp. 39-40

 ++

This was picked up by Kierkegaard in his idle chatter and there is something akin to gossip. 

Gregory M Reichberg has a great article on Studiositas as a kind of mindfulness, or "the virtue of attention" that I like a lot.

He begins his essay with Dante:

At the entrance to the first ring of Hell, Dante reads the famous lines inscribed above the outer portal to that accursed city, an inscription which concludes with these famed and ominous words: "abandon every hope, ye who enter here." Perplexed and troubled, Dante seeks clarification from his guide Virgil, who utters this simple phrase in response: "we have come to the place where ... you will see the wretched people who have lost the good of the intellect." As if to offset the force of this harsh and enigmatic explanation, Dante confides how Virgil "placed his hands in mine, and with a cheerful look from which I took comfort. he led me among the hidden things."

The good of the intellect: this is what the wretched people have lost.

It's quite an image and quite a thing to think about that human misery is connected to the incapability of the intellect (an inability to pursue truth). Rather than an idle pursuing of whatever interests a person at any given time (this has more in common with escapism), studiositas is more of a disciplined pursuit, requiring a kind of fortitude. It is related to sōphrosynēs, which carries the sense of soundness of mind, discretion, and prudence.

Self-knowledge
Self-restraint
Harmony

++

Nature Journal editor has a great book out on the history of curiosity in science. 

 

 

 

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