Today, the Senate (Upper House) of the French parliament will vote on a bill to criminalize the denial of the Armenian Genocide. This bill was drafted by lawmakers from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party and approved by the National Assembly (Lower House) on December 22^nd of last year. If it passes the Senate, anyone who publically denies the First World War mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks constituted genocide will face a one-year jail term and a fine of up to 45,000 Euros. According to Patrick Ollier, a UMP parliamentarian, the bill simply conjoins a 1991 French law defining Shoah denial as a crime. “This is a simple coordination of punishment,” he said.

Reactions to the passing of the bill have so far been perfunctory. Turkish nationalists have flown their colors at home and abroad, and Turkey has enacted some sanctions against France, threatening more if the bill becomes law. This, in spite of the facts that the bill does not accuse modern Turkey of anything, nor does it in any way affect citizens of Turkey who choose to practice obfuscation and denial at home. Agence France-Presse quotes Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying, “I ask you: Is there freedom of thought and freedom of expression in France? The answer is, ‘No.’ France has abolished the spirit of free discussion.” He also made a bizarre attempt to accuse the French of cooking Algerians in ovens akin to Nazi crematoriums.

Scores of other public figures, bloggers, and lawmakers have followed up with their own opinions on the possible ramifications for French freedom of expression and democracy were the bill to become law. They all have warned of eroding democracy and discrimination. Not a single one has considered how such a law might, on the contrary, enable the freedom of expression.

An example. In 1934, MGM Studios purchased the filming rights to Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel about the self-defense of an Armenian community on Musa Dagh, at the eastern end of the Ottoman Empire, during the First World War. Clark Gable was slated to play a leading role. Production on the film had just begun when MGM received word from the US State Department that the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Mehmed Münir Ertegün (father of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegün) was anxious for his country not to be poorly portrayed in Hollywood films. Several water-downed versions of the Musa Dagh script were sent to Ertegün but he remained recalcitrant. Losing patience with the idea of a foreign power making editorial decisions for him, MGM’s production chief declared, “To hell with the Turks, I’m going to make the picture anyway.” Ertegün responded with a threat: “If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it. It rekindles the Armenian Question. The Armenian Question is settled.” Indeed, Turkey did launch a campaign. The September 3^rd 1935 issue of the Istanbul-based Haber newspaper featured an editorial warning Jews and Jewish companies doing business in Turkey that they would suffer if MGM (owned by Louis B. Mayer, a Jew) produced the film. Mayer, reluctantly, threw in the towel and the film was never made. The French had their part to play in the censorship of this film in America, inasmuch as their interests in the Dardanelles, as well as their concerns about the relations between Nazi Germany and Turkey, ensured their loyalties to the latter. For a thorough treatment of this affair, see the 2007 book by Edward Minasian, published by Cold Tree Press.

Musa Dagh is a heroic novel about overcoming utmost adversity. As such it found appeal in one of Hollywood’s more anthemic directors, Sylvester Stallone, who in 2006 announced his intention to resurrect Musa Dagh, but quietly abandoned the idea after receiving threatening emails. In 2009, Mel Gibson reportedly expressed interest in directing and appearing in a documentary version of Musa Dagh, but also abandoned his ambition following an email campaign spearheaded by a Turkish-American lobby group known as ASIMED.

Whether or not one accepts there is a trade-off in freedoms of expression when censorship laws weigh in favor of one special interest group or another, this can be the case. It is especially noticeable when a loud voice is muted so that softer voices may be heard. Had there been an American law against Armenian Genocide denial in 1934, this extraordinary case of extra-national censorship would not have occurred. But such a law would also have prevented scholarship, however dubious, by Drs. Justin McCarthy, Heath Lowry, and Guenter Lewy all of whom have experienced some some degree of difficulty, however self-inflicted, in expressing their views over the years.

If we believe in freedom of expression as a dialectical tool in sustained reasoned discussion, as John Stuart Mill prescribed it, then the French bill, along with similar laws regarding Shoah denial, is counterproductive. But neither Mill nor any of his inheritors, to my knowledge, including Michel Foucault, has analyzed the nature of censorship as a political pendulum within the greater historical dialectic of free societies. Is freedom of expression really an inert force to which everyone has access at all times? It seems to me it is eminently alienable, made so by those who have the coercive power to impose consequences. When the interests of two competing, asymmetrically proportioned groups are at stake, freedom of expression would seem to favor the one with more institutional power, yet public opinion and media must be taken here as a special cases of institution.

Fewer than twenty people have been convicted of Holocaust denial in Europe, and most of them invited the conviction as a martyrdom opportunity. Following Mill, if the most egregious result of Shoah Denial laws is the thirteen months David Irving spent in an Austrian jail for his opinions, then this must be weighed against tendencies for potential harm caused right-wing extortions against scholars and entertainment industry executives. Then again, if Pamela Pilger can mouth off, why can’t John Galliano?

If Turkish groups feel free to extend their own peeves into American art and commerce through extortion, then we are already practicing self-censorship. Though a criminalizing of Armenian Genocide (as well as Shoah) denial in the USA seems ill-advised, it should be noted that no one screaming about free expression is advocating for US recognition of the genocide, however much freedom of expression it would abet.

None of these countermeasures would be necessary without Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal for anyone to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions. The original 2005 wording was even vaguer, making it a crime to insult “Turkishness”, whatever that may be. In 2008, the article was amended to its present form. Far more draconian than any European form of censorship, a number of high profile charges have been brought due to 301, including against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who said in an interview with Das Magazin, a Swiss weekly newspaper supplement, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here [in Turkey], and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.”

In 2006, Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was also prosecuted under the Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness” after a rather mild and conciliatory article about the Armenian Genocide. He received a six month suspended sentence, but was assassinated by Turkish nationalists before he could serve it. He was acquitted posthumously. In 2007, Hrant’s son, Arat, and Serkis Seropyan were convicted under 301 to one-year suspended sentences under for reprinting Dink’s articles. Ironically, Hrant Dink’s experiences with censorship taught him to loathe it, and he on several occasions said to his friends he was not in favor of the nascent French bill, and moreover would personally travel to France to break it.

In the end, the Armenian Genocide bill has nothing to do with freedom of expression, per se. There are two main motivations behind it, one being the guaranteeing of half a million French-Armenian votes for Sarkozy in upcoming elections; the second and more relevant being the acid test for Turkey in its European Union ambitions. Turkey’s poorly calculated and emotional responses to the French bill, whose mirror image it upholds and enforces as a law, are good indicators of the arrogance and self-servitude it will bring to all questions of internal policy as an EU candidate. They have triggered the pratfall and kicking is only making them look worse.

In the likely event the bill does not pass the Senate, Sarkozy knows he has, for his efforts, already curried the favor of his French-Armenian population and secured the votes he wanted. The bill’s rejection will relieve the French Turks and he will be on his way to victory. This is a baiting method he learned from Obama. But Sarkozy is not the only one eager to harvest the echoes of this sad historical episode and their ramifications on freedom of expression in Europe. On January 3^rd, wealthy French businessman and political aspirant Rachid Nekkaz created a 1 million Euro fund to pay the fine of anyone convicted in France of denying the Armenian Genocide. Formerly, he also offered to pay fines imposed on French Muslim women caught wearing a burqa. Nekkaz, who has quite a lot to learn about both historiography and the limits of the French bill (see the hapless December 27^th 2011 entry of his French-language blog), is also hard at work purchasing political capital. Were he so concerned with constitutional freedom of expression as he claims to be, perhaps he would be willing to help fund and promote a Sylvester Stallone feature film called The Forty Days of Musa Dagh? Something tells me his priorities are further from freedom of expression and closer to himself, as are those of nearly everyone involved in this affair.

The shiver of political anxiety that winds through Eric Santner’s book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald arises from the work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose theory of the “state of exception” figured prominently in the juridical foundations of the Third Reich. Santner’s anxiety is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his important work Homo Sacer, and by Jacques Derrida in his lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, and it concerns the way Schmitt’s thesis is once again expressing itself in the world, particularly in America’s “war on terror.” Santner contextualizes Schmitt’s thinking by examining an impressive slate of German writers that includes Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Kafka, and also the more recent work of the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald. The Jewish “psychotheologist” Franz Rosensweig also figures prominently in the discussion. It’s a heady brew, in other words, and one of the most impressive aspects of the book is how deftly Santner manages to illuminate the nuances that differentiate these big glaciers of thought while also mapping their continuities.

While the book has no direct relationship with modern drama, Santner’s thesis sheds light on how dramatists from Beckett to Pinter, Fornes and Sarah Kane have depicted “creatureliness” on stage. Moreover, this subject matter, and also Santner’s treatment of it, can usefully be examined via complexity theory as marking the emergence of a new “structure of feeling” that connects to political, social and ecological realities confronting us as a species today. “Structure of feeling” is a term Raymond Williams defines in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht as “the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.”[i] Writing in 1969, Williams’ language is reminiscent of how complexity theoreticians would define “network thinking” some twenty years later[ii], and that is resonant also with the “intelligent materialism” attributed to Deleuze and Guattari by eco-theorists such as Bernd Herzogenrath and Hanjo Berressen.[iii]

Those who have read Sebald’s novels The Emmigrants, Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, or his book-length poem After Nature will perhaps have been struck by how deeply embodied the experience of his writing is. A kind of exquisite melancholia arises from Sebald’s text, which drifts across the boundaries that typically separate memoir and fiction. This powerful affect is also actually the subject of Santner’s inquiry. He tracks this “structure of feeling” back through Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama to Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy and links it to a mode of being in which we internalize the alienating and oppressive weight of sovereignty by way of a “petrified unrest” typical of creatureliness. Santner calls this mode of being spectral materialism.

The intent here is to undermine the alarming analogy Schmitt makes in his political theory between the role of miracle in pre-modern theology and the power of the sovereign to suspend the force of law, and, in a unilateral fashion, reduce human beings to the extra-legal status of animals. Santner closes his book with an analysis of Rilke’s famous poem the Archaic Torso of Apollo, an analysis that posits a way out of the Oedipal dynamic that, arguably, animates Schmitt’s thinking. “Self-being-in-Otherness,” is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, a state of neighborliness one finds also in Deleuze and Guattari under the rubric of the “group-subject.” Santner’s argument about the role art plays in opening this “miraculous exception” from authoritarian domination is arguably an attempt to re-direct Schmitt’s thinking toward an anti-fascist agenda.

The continuities between the “spectral materialism” described by Santner and the “intelligent materialism” of Deleuze and Guattari underscore the tectonic cultural shift we are currently undergoing in this age of global bio-politics. The test of this new materialism is its capacity to illuminate the intricate subjectivities of art, and particularly the new(ish) structures of feeling that imbue certain works of art with a sense that they exist beyond us, in a future we are destined for. Though as a psychoanalytical work, On Creaturely Life orients itself quite differently than anything in Delueze and Guattari, I believe this only makes Santner’s work an ideal vehicle for illuminating these continuities. To even mention Deleuze and Guattari in the context of a psychoanalytic text is to suggest that there’s a baby in with the psychoanalytical bathwater we are in the process of discarding.

What is this “baby in the bathwater?” Perhaps how the creature of “bare life” conceals within himself a source of innate and irreducible freedom. As Santner puts it, “The question raised by all of Benjamin’s work pertains to the possibility of actively mobilizing the resources of remembrance in a post-Proustian world without direct or immediate recourse to the language and structures of religious life. And once again, what is at stake in such a mobilization is above all the possibility of suspending that dimension of our lives where we are delivered over to our creatureliness.” [iv]

Intriguing as it may be, one has the sense Sebald’s “spectral materialism” tells only half of an important story, and that what must still be addressed are the ways man is in no way separate from “nature.” Santner’s assumption that this split exists is itself problematic, suggesting a nostalgia for familiar psychological forms that convey a sense of being cheated, a case of Lacanian longeuers in which we pine for unattainable jouissance, and that impossible reuninon with petit object a. An intoxication is perhaps at work here, a Jones for ineffable longing. This passivity of affect tends to blunt the book’s arguments, particularly toward Part 4 where the analysis trails off like a very interesting but unfinished sentence. The psychoanalytic frame tends toward a reductive focus on the phallic function rather than an opening out in which the book’s undeniably valuable insights might contribute to an expansive discourse that includes other disciplines and the promise of transformation.

And yet, if On Creaturely Life feels a bit like a fragment, a beautiful ruin, this perhaps only serves to amplify Santner’s analysis of the feeling-tone of stunned awestruck-ness that characterizes German modernism from Holderlin through Celan, and its baleful significance for contemporary politics. In the technical jargon of complexity theory, Santner identifies an “adaptive” cultural discourse that is still in the process of emerging today, and he sheds light on hidden connections between this discourse and our fractured contemporary scene, and the potential for change it conceals. Given how forcefully On Creaturely Life reveals the linkages between the particular artistic-literary system that is its subject, and the dominant cultural and political systems that shape our experience, we can perhaps afford to cut Santner some slack on his occasional over-reliance on psychoanalytic reasoning.

NOTES

[ii] Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 233

[iii] Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 6

[iv] Eric L. Santner On Creaturely Life (London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009)  140

Avid reader friends of mine recommended An Equal Music for its beautiful poetic language. In fact, the first page is a lovely poem, followed by a John Donne quote on page two wherefrom the book appears to derive its title. With the further promise of travel and lively dialogue, I settled in quickly into the heretofore unknown world of musicianship.

An Equal Music is both a story of a youthful love gone awry, rekindled ten years hence, and a fully considered affair with music. The main characters are the members of the Maggiore Quartet comprised of Michael Holme (our narrator), Piers, Helen and Billy.  The sensual love interest is Julia who forms the quintet for a single engagement. We travel from a humble but beautiful top floor London flat with a view of Hyde Park, to Vienna, Venice and back.

The members of the quartet are talented, complicated and appealing. “Billy is far too fat, and always will be.  He will always be distracted by family and money worries, car insurance and composition.  For all our frustration and rebuke, he will never be on time.  But the moment his bow comes down on the strings he is transfigured.  He is a wonderful cellist, light and profound: the base of our harmony, the rock on which we rest.” Michael, the quartet’s second violin, has never felt unhappy with his position, though he says he agrees with whoever said it should more properly be called “the other violinist”.  He does not consider his spot the lesser, in fact, he believes the second violin is a more versatile chair. “Sometimes, like the viola, it is at the textural heart of the quartet; at others it sings with a lyricism equal to that of the first violin, but in a darker and more difficult register.”

Michael is preoccupied by the re-emergence of the love of his life. I often forget Julia’s name because I never feel I know her quite well enough. The Maggiore Quartet holds her in the highest regard, but I found her emotionally distant, inaccessible. She is all about silk slips and composure, in and out of the concert hall, even as she juggles a husband and child, career and Michael. With about half the book dedicated to the affair between Julia and Michael, I leave it to the reader to determine if Julia’s career shift from piano accompanist to soloist, and the reasons for it, creates a satisfying enough character. Michael’s stunted emotionality had me grappling with why he wasn’t seeking therapy. It took a second reading to cut him a little slack and find his vulnerability believable. At first blush, the force of his angst, at once debilitating and then fierce, doesn’t seem fully earned.

In Seth’s deft hands, a love of classical music and all that it conjures is finely articulated. Early in the novel, the Maggiore Quartet is to play a concert of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, in that order. As Piers puts it, there’s a thematic connection, each quartet contains a fugal movement. Billy thinks they are getting the key relations all mixed up. “It’s total confusion. First three sharps, then one sharp, then four.  There’s no sense of progression, no sense of progression at all, and the audience is bound to feel the structural stress.” He wants to change the order of the Mozart and the Haydn so that there will be an ascending order of sharps, and thereby a sense of perceived structure. Helen offers that the Mozart was written after the Haydn to which Piers questions the audience’s chronological stress. Billy says they can change the Haydn A major and perform a later Haydn, one that was written after the Mozart,Opus 50 that’s in F sharp minor.  “It’s also got three sharps, so nothing changes.  It’s terribly interesting.  It’s got all sorts of – oh yes, and it too has a fugal last movement… ” Michael disagrees contending that the audience doesn’t care about the order of sharps. Billy retorts “but I do and we all should.”

Vikram Seth offers his most poetic words for Michael as he reflects on what is to come.  “A winter evening in the Wigmore Hall, the sacred shoe-box of chamber music.  We have spent the last month practicing intensively for this night.  The fare is simple – three classical quartets:  Haydn’s opus 20 no. 6 in A major, my most beloved quartet; then the first of the six quartets that Mozart himself dedicated to Haydn, in G major; and finally, after the interval, Beethoven’s steeplechase-cum-marathon, the ethereal, jokey, unpausing, miraculous, exhausting quartet in C sharp minor, which he composed a year before his death, and which, just as the score of the “Messiah” had consoled and delighted him on his deathbed, was to delight an console Schubert as he lay dying in the same city a year later.”

The quartet’s quibbling over Bach, to record or not to record The Art of Fugue is equally enjoyable. The piece’s length gives Piers to voice that they could never perform it, “Quartets don’t do that sort of thing on stage. Besides, Bach didn’t write it for string quartet.” Billy thinks that if the string quartet existed in Bach’s time he’d have written for it. Piers is weary of Billy’s hotline to dead composers. It is here, with The Art of Fugue, that we get to know Helen, who must find a viola she can tune down a fourth, which leads her to a talkative instrument maker and then, in turn, to an early music devotee who, according to Piers, plays a baroque fiddle, wears sandals and sports a beard.  There appear to be stereotypes among musicians.

The Art of Fugue, Die Kunst der Fuge BWV1080 Contrapunctus I, JS Bach (1685–1750)
Emerson String Quartet, Deutche Grammophon, 2003

After the Wigmore concert, the quartet prepares for Vienna where they will perform Schubert’s Trout Quintet (accompanied by Julia on the piano).  One critic hates the Trout for all its “tedious charm.  It knows exactly what the right moves are, and it makes them all.  It’s light and it’s trite.  I’m astonished that anyone still plays it.” Piers loves the Trout and regrets that “everyone treats it as if it’s a sort of divertimento – or worse.” It turns out Piers’ feelings for the piece are mixed.  He says, “It’s a funny old piece.  It stops and starts and has so many repeats but I truly love it.” Michael thinks it is one movement too long.

The book is smart and does justice to the tight rope an artist walks between natural talent, discipline, focus, respect and intuition. When Michael considers giving up music, Piers’ response is no more than the basic truth of the matter.  “…I’ve stopped thinking creating anything short of a masterpiece is pointless.  I just ask myself two questions about what I’m doing here in my niche in the galaxy.  Is it better done or not?  And is it better that I do this than something else?” He pauses, then saying,  “And I suppose I’ve just added another one:  is it better that someone else does this than me?”

For an enchanting description of Venice, Seth gives to us, “The stone bridge at the Rialto, the wooden bridge at the Accademia, the great grey dome of the Salute, the columns and bell-tower of San Marco, the pink–and-white confection of the Doge’s palace pass over us or by us one after the other; and all so luxuriously, so predictably, so languidly, so swiftly, so astonishingly that there is something about it that is disturbing, almost gluttonous.  It is a relief to be in the open basin of the lagoon, unhemmed by gorgeousness.” No matter how many times I scan this paragraph, I continue to be transported by it.

I first read this book the summer before last and all that fall played Schubert’s Trout and Bach’s, The Art of Fugue (both string and piano).  My most recent read of An Equal Music included interludes of Beethoven String Quartets (a full box set was marvelously found in my husband’s CD collection).  My music education is slim at best, and I’ve never read a novel that prompted hours of attentive listening. But there I was, and still am, a little lighter for the Trout’s cheeriness, unequaled in obsessed contemplation as for The Art of Fugue and continually dumb struck by big bad Beethoven who seems to be able to do whatever he wants.  It is the love story with the music that is by far the tale of this novel that soars.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Charles Baxter read his work many times. He is very often introduced as a rock star of the short story. Another assertion is that he is regionalized. The stories are grounded in the Midwest and generally peopled with likable characters that lead small lives in which ordinary and yet poignant things happen. I often feel that I too am a Baxter character. Gryphon is a collection of twenty-three stories, new and selected. I have read these stories without hurry or care to reach the end; only to be astounded by the steady unveiling of character, spot on dialogue and the unembellished articulation of what it means to be human.

The Eleventh Floor is a father-son story. It is set in an upscale apartment; there’s reference to a Barcelona chair and a Lichtenstein on the wall, not to mention the comings and goings of a Peruvian housekeeper. Mr. Bradbury considers his drinking before lunch his weekend hobby. Eric is his college age son who is about to embark on a year long retreat to a cabin in the woods, but needs a bit of cash from Dad to do so. Mr. Bradbury’s response is “I didn’t think your generation indulged in such hefty idealism. I thought they were all designing computers and snorting the profits gram by gram. But this, a rustication, living in cabins and searching the soul, why, it’s positively Russian.” The following quote is an impressive example of Baxter’s enviable handling of subtext. “If your mother were still alive, I’d be getting all riled up and telling you to get settled down and finish your studies and all that sort of thing. Mothers don’t like it when their sons go off sulking into the woods.” The “rustication” doesn’t last, and when Eric next appears it is with Darlene, a grocery store cashier who we quickly learn has one year of community college, can tune a car, and suffers from insomnia. Dad’s retort, “Oh, I get it. You went up north looking for nature, and you found it, and you brought it back.” Offering unwanted embellishments he adds, “Overbite, straight hair, chapped hands, whopping tits, and all.” Eric and Darlene are in love, and while Mr. Bradbury finds Eric’s emotional gushing “deplorable” the story moves quickly to its finish. During a long wakeful night there are tender moments between Eric and Darlene that are secretly overheard or observed by Mr. Bradbury. “It wasn’t whispering so much as a drone from his son.” “Daisy and Tom and Jordon Baker undramatically droned into existence.” And later, eavesdropping, he watches Eric ceremoniously prepare a sandwich. For Eric and Darlene the night is passed with shared intimacies while Mr. Bradbury’s eleventh floor bedroom view is starkly singular.

The story about an unconventional fourth grade substitute teacher is also the book’s title, Gryphon. Our protagonist is one of the students. The first paragraph plunks you right down into the social structure of a primary school room. My personal memories come flooding back to me, and I can almost smell the tuna sandwiches packed in sack lunch bags and see them neatly stowed in multi-colored cubbies. We are in the Five Oaks community of Michigan and the supply of substitute teachers consists of about four mothers with community college degrees. Miss Ferenczi however, is not only an outsider she’s unorthodox. When one student recites the multiplication tables of six, he gets it wrong. Miss Ferenczi does not correct him, but one of the other students does. The teacher responds, “In higher mathematics, which you children do not yet understand, six times eleven can be considered to be sixty-eight.” She tells them that in “higher mathematics numbers are…more fluid.” Miss Ferenczi eats a stuffed fig, smoked sturgeon and raw spinach for lunch. The children wonder if it’s even food.  She has her own brand of history and offers a stream of consciousness lesson covering anthropology, biology, astronomy and death. “There is no death,” she offers. “That which is, cannot die.” She reads the children their tarot card fortunes. Turns out, some fourth graders aren’t too comfortable when fortune is fatal, while others begin to wonder what might be found between that which is as linear and prescribed as the Five Oaks primary school curriculum and that which is maybe not so much so.

I’ve read Fenstad’s Mother many times. It appeared in Best American Short Stories in 1989, and it is in the collection A Relative Stranger published by Norton in 2001. It is also included in Gryphon. Fenstad writes brochures in the publicity department of a computer company during the day, and teaches an extension English-composition class two nights a week. He loves to ice skate, especially late at night, and attends church. Fenstad’s mother, Clara, is a “lifelong social progressive who has spent her life in the company of rebels and deviationists.” She finds her son’s churchgoing “amusing.” It is mid January and Clara wants a change of pace. Fenstad suggests she come to the next composition class. He tells her the subject for the evening is logic. Once again we are in a classroom. Baxter presents a smorgasbord of night school students and all their range. There are a lot of people in this story, people with names and who are described and who drive the story forward – no small feat in a short work. In class, Fenstad asks the students what, if anything, is logically wrong with the following sentence. ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem.’ In other words, he says to the class, “what might be wrong with saying that most people have a unique problem?” The student’s are befuddled and come up with all sorts of answers and solutions that don’t relate to the question of semantics. As for me, I overthought it and things rapidly became circular. When pressed, Fenstad himself cannot think of a unique problem, which presumably is logically what’s wrong with the sentence. From the back of the room, Fenstad’s mother offers that problems aren’t personal, they are collective.  The class comes to an end. Weeks later, after many interesting and possibly debilitating incidences for Clara, and under surprising circumstances, she comes up with a lively announcement that proves the logic of Fenstad’s sentence.  Not only that, she permanently endears herself to us without sentimentality. Still, I occasionally go back to my circular reasoning, because the sentence, “I, like most people, have a unique problem” simply turns me upside down.  However, after I somersault around with my self-imposed conundrum three or four times, I find my feet back on the ground with Fenstad and his mother, two characters I don’t think of as fictional.

Baxter is the author of five novels and several short story collections. I have often referred to his nonfiction works, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction and The Art of Subtext-Beyond Plot for guidance and clarification. As for Gryphon, I have this to say.  A couple of years ago my husband and I visited Andalusia, the rural Georgia home of the late Flannery O’Connor.  When you are there, you can leaf through some of  O’Connor’s childhood books and see that many of them have handwritten comments on the pages.  I picked up one (and thanks to Craig at the Andalusia Foundation, I now know the name – it’s called Five Little Peppers and How They Grew). The inscription reads, “This is a first rate book and it belongs to M. F. O’Connor and don’t fiddle with it!”  I might just have to inscribe my copy of Gryphon similarly.

In 1888, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) arrived in England to study law, hardly anyone came to receive him at the port. He dressed like an average Englishman and went about his business in obscurity. In 1931 this same man arrived again in England to attend the Second Round Table Conference to broker peace between the British government and the Indian Independence Movement. This time huge crowds of people poured in the streets of London to have a glimpse of him, for he was dressed in a loincloth, like the poorest of Indians whom he came to represent. Hundreds would gather to listen to this “Nanga Fakir” (as Mr. Winston Churchill used to call him). The crowds were touched and influenced by the thoughts he expressed in his clear voice and simple English.

On the occasion of one such speech at Kingsley Hall, technicians from the Columbia Gramophone Company were present with a record cutter. They had in mind to make a profit by making the first ever recording of Gandhiji’s voice. While they were successful in persuading Gandhiji, he expressed his unwillingness to commit any political speech to shellac. So he chose his old essay ‘On God’ and recorded it for Columbia Company in the third week of October 1931. The title of the disc was ‘Spiritual Message’ and this six minute long speech was issued in two parts, and on two sides of a 78-rpm disc (catalogue No. LBE 50). Gandhiji also signed a legal contract with the recording company at this time, and according to the terms and conditions, any royalty earned by him on the sale of copies of this disc was to be credited to the ‘Sakal Charkha Sanghatana’ (All India Weavers Association), Ahmedabad.

In the year 1931, the Indian National Congress Party (INC) adopted a new design of its tricolor flag, with three horizontal bands with colors: saffron, white and green and a spinning wheel (charkha) in the centre of the middle white colored band. The same color sequence was chosen in designing the label of this important disc. Thus three concentric colored circular rings were used in the label design with the signature M.K. Gandhi at the bottom in gold. This special disc was made available in 1932. Hundreds of copies were sent even outside India. The discs were sold in India at four rupees and eight annas. At the time, this was the average monthly income of a middle class Indian family. Thus the agents of recording company were not optimistic about the sale of this disc, especially since the speech was recorded in English. However, to their surprise people in India queued up to buy the discs and gramophone machines on which to play it. Even those who did not understand English bought them and listened just to hear the sound of Gandhiji’s voice.

Original Disc First Pressed in India

In Madras, M/S Saraswati Stores were the official agents of the Columbia Company. In January 1932, their manager wrote a letter to the Chief Secretary of Madras Presidency, requesting him not to impose any ban on the sale and distribution of this disc, as there was nothing ‘political’ and ‘objectionable’ in this speech. For, such a ban would shelve some 12,000 copies in the warehouse of the stores and the company would have run into loss. Recently, in an exhibition organized by Chennai Archives this letter was on display.

Gandhiji earned two thousand rupees royalty payment on the initial sale of the disc in South India, but this manager did not know anything about the recipients, ‘All India Weavers Association of Ahmedabad’ which was located in the northern part of India. Hence, it was paid directly to the recipients by the parent company in England. The business strategy of the Columbia Company was successful beyond expectations. After the Second World War, this disc was again in great demand and fresh copies were pressed with new label designs, suitable for sale in England, India and even in America.

Gandhiji was honored with the title ‘Mahatma’ (Great Soul) long ago by ‘Kamdar’s in 1915 but he never used it and did not wish to be addressed as such. However he was always called ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ and the ‘Father of the Nation’ (Rashtrapita) against his own wish. After his assassination, ‘Spiritual Message’ disc was again in circulation. The disc has been listed in the Columbia record catalogue until 1956. Over 100,000 copies in 78-rpm format were sold in these twenty-five years. Today very few copies survive in the hands of collectors, archives and depositories. Later, the recording on this disc was reissued on vinyl LP’s and audio tapes during Gandhiji’s birth centenary in 1969.

Original Disc First Pressed in the United Kingdom

This unusual and historically important recording will be eighty years old in October 2011. Although the original discs will be preserved by individuals and institutions, the ‘Spiritual Message’ is now available for download. It seems that the message becomes more and more relevant each year in these times of distrust, hatred, violence and terrorism spreading globally.

Mahatma Ganhdi, His Spiritual Message,  1931

The text of the Recorded Speech:

“There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent. Even in ordinary affairs we know that people do not know who rules or why and how He rules and yet they know that there is a power that certainly rules. In my tour last year in Mysore I met many poor villagers and I found upon inquiry that they did not know who ruled Mysore. They simply said some God ruled it. If the knowledge of these poor people was so limited about their ruler I who am infinitely lesser in respect to God than they to their ruler need not be surprised if I do not realize the presence of God – the King of Kings. Nevertheless, I do feel, as the poor villagers felt about Mysore, that there is orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is not a blind law, for no blind law can govern the conduct of living being and thanks to the marvelous researches of Sir J. C. Bose it can now be proved that even matter is life. That law then which governs all life is God. Law and the law-giver are one. I may not deny the law or the law-giver because I know so little about it or Him. Just as my denial or ignorance of the existence of an earthly power will avail me nothing even so my denial of God and His law will not liberate me from its operation, whereas humble and mute acceptance of divine authority makes life’s journey easier even as the acceptance of earthly rule makes life under it easier. I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates. That informing power of spirit is God, and since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent, for I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is life, truth, light. He is love. He is the supreme Good. But He is no God who merely satisfies the intellect, if He ever does. God to be God must rule the heart and transform it. He must express himself in every smallest act of His votary. This can only be done through a definite realization, more real than the five senses can ever produce. Sense perceptions can be and often are false and deceptive, however real they may appear to us. Where there is realization outside the senses it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within. Such testimony is to be found in the experiences of an unbroken line of prophets and sages in all countries and climes. To reject this evidence is to deny oneself. This realization is preceded by an immovable faith. He who would in his own person test the fact of God’s presence can do so by a living faith and since faith itself cannot be proved by extraneous evidence the safest course is to believe in the moral government of the world and therefore in the supremacy of the moral law, the law of truth and love. Exercise of faith will be the safest where there is a clear determination summarily to reject all that is contrary to truth and love. I confess that I have no argument to convince through reason. Faith transcends reason. All that I can advise is not to attempt the impossible.”

Swamplandia!, Karen Russell author, Knopf, 2011
by Melanie Wudl

It’s hard to get your bearings in Swamplandia! The story is a fantasy that is partially narrated by the book’s protagonist, a thirteen year old girl, Ava Bigtree. This is not material that would normally interest me, but when it came highly recommended by a trusted source, off I went with the Bigtree family and their odd assortment of calamities.

Forebear of the Bigtree clan, Grandpa Sawtooth Bigtree, née Ernest Schedrach, was born the son of a white coal miner in Ohio, who, after losing his pulp mill job bought ‘farmland’ off the coast of southwest Florida, sight unseen. It turned out to be mostly covered by water with a small habitable island (part of the Ten Thousand Islands) and he named it Swamplandia!, a hundred-acre waste. Grandpa picked the name Sawtooth in “homage to the sedge that surrounded the island; Bigtree because he liked its root-strong sound.” From this point on, the family lineage is a continual fabrication. As Ava points out with respect to the Swamplandia! museum/gift shop, “Certain artifacts appeared or vanished, dates changed and old events appeared in fresh blue ink on new cards beneath the dusty exhibits, and you couldn’t say one word about these changes in the morning. You had to pretend like the Bigtree story had always read that way.”

We are told that at one time Swamplandia! was the number one gator theme park and swamp café in the area. When we meet Ava Bigtree, her mother, Hilola, is its alligator- wrestling star. Four times a week Hilola high dives into the gator pit and swims with the beasts only to surface heroically at the other end. Ava’s father is called the Chief and he runs the park – sort of.  The alligators are all called Seth, collectively, the Seths. There are other zany attractions, like Live Chicken Thursdays and a bear named Judy Garland. At this point I almost put the book down but for a bit of arresting information offered by Ava. “One curious fact about Seth Physiognomy is this: while a Seth can close its jaws with 2,125 pounds per square inch of force, the force of a guillotine, the musculature that opens those same jaws is extremely weak.  This is the secret a wrestler exploits to beat her adversaries – if you can get your Seth’s jaws shut up in your fist, it is next to impossible for the creature to open them again.  A girl’s good ribbon can tie off the jaws of a four-hundred-pound bull gator.”

When Hilola dies of ovarian cancer at age thirty-six, a ”Malig-Nancy” as Ava hears the word, circumstances for the family begin to unravel in earnest.  Ava is left with her sixteen year old sister Osceola, her nineteen year old brother Kiwi and the Chief. As it stands, Osceola is obsessed with an alchemy book called The Spiritist’s Telegraph, her Ouija board and talking to dead people. Kiwi is so starved for a mainland education he gives himself report cards. The Chief is downright deluded. At times Ava’s wise observations exceed her years, “Some things you know right away to be final – when you lose your last baby tooth, or when you go to sleep for the ultimate time as a twelve-year-old on the night before your thirteenth birthday.  Other times, you have to work out the milestones later via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I’d just blown through my last ever Wednesday with Mom on the day after she died.”

With no star attraction the tourists have all fled to the competition, the World of Darkness. The raunchy carnival color at the World of Darkness makes Swamplandia look like a neighborhood kiddie park. For starters, there’s the Leviathan (it’s actually an airplane hanger) that houses creepy rides with crude special effects, guests are called “lost souls” and the baked goods stand is named Devil’s Oven. The World of Darkness promises non-stop thrills at high speed, thus the Chief launches his quaky campaign christened “Carnival Darwinism.”

According to the Chief, the logic is as follows—“Island tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators. We Bigtree’s are an island species.   …A bunch of new and wonderful crap can evolve here because we’re off to ourselves.  But there are also trade-offs.  Island species get complacent.”

On a black board he writes:
“NEW PREDATOR:  WORLD OF DARKNESS

OUR EVOLUTION:  CARNIVAL DARWINISM

ADAPTATION I:  INVEST IN SALTWATER CROCS

ADAPTATION 2:  WE BECOME AMPHIBIOUS – NEW WET-SUIT

COSTUMES FOR THE GIRLS?  SCUBA WITH THE SETHS?

ADAPTATION 3:  MODERNIZE THE GATOR PIT – ILLUMINATED DIVING BOARD, BUBBLE JETS.”

The omniscient narrator alternately gives us Kiwi’s point of view. Kiwi is the story’s realist. He is a good kid and you wish the Chief was less of a buffoon so that the family can face what’s really coming down the pike, Osceola’s crossover into the underworld. Even before Ossie’s grip on reality takes a hard right, Kiwi takes action by leaving Swamplandia!, going to work for the  World of Darkness and attend night school. Kiwi is funny too. By his own admission he can more easily imagine his graduation from Harvard than the intervening steps it will take to get into high school. The Chief also takes off for the mainland, presumably on an auspicious business trip, leaving the two girls to fend for themselves.

As Ava writes:
“Week 3: The Chief is still gone.

Seths: Ninety-eight.

Sisters: Two

Brothers: Zero

Tourists: Zero

Ghosts: One

Park Hours: ?

Mom: ???”

Then events take another turn. Ossie wanders off to marry Louis Thanksgiving, a fabricated, and deceased, dredgeman. It is Louis’ story, or The Dredgeman’s Revelation, that pulled me right in. The chapter offers a brilliant writing of family neglect and abuse with a big dose of Florida history. I was partial to the bits about the Model Land Company, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Melaleuca trees. While in lesser hands this material could have become burdensome and pedantic, it in fact allows Russell to keep the story on this side of plausible. I can’t resist offering the following excerpts: “You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou? .. You’d be better off gum tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies; it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s jus saw grass til you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.” And, “The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!”

The wonderfully spirited Ava departs for the underworld in search of Osceola with the Bird Man, who says, “Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.” It’s a dark trip cloaked in sweat and peppered with wonderful descriptions of the flora and fauna – herons, feral peacocks, water moccasins, buzzards and saw grass. I won’t say more about the Bird Man except that on or about day three of the search, Ava hears her mother’s voice say, “The Bird Man is just a man, honey. He is more lost out here than you are. The Bird Man has no idea where he’s taking you, and if he does, well that’s much worse, and you won’t find your sister anywhere near there, Ava, and I would run, honey, personally….”

The story wraps up rather quickly with Kiwi making some implausible moves to rescue Ossie and more over, the Chief acting almost like a parent. As I mentioned, initially I was not the most receptive reader and nearly gave up. But as Russell continually collides with the incredulous, she develops her characters with tenderness and humor. The book is an inventive and richly written story about a family’s triumph over obstacle. That is always a good story when handled with keen observation, honesty and wit, as it is in Swamplandia!

The following is Part 2 of a two-part series. In this piece I take up the challenge of beginning to apply the theory of adaptive cycles to the processes by which we weave our perceptions into a coherent world. If Part 1 was on the academic side, this is decidedly more personal, exploring subjective states I have experienced, and their possible implications in terms of social history. Click here for Part 1

When I look out my window I see houses across a small valley, and the leafy tops of the trees that grow between the houses. The morning is hazy, and all the different surfaces of this landscape reflect the soft light toward me. The rays of light pass through my retina and become impulses along the branching lines of my optic nerves. My brain weaves these various scraps of visual sense data into a stable and familiar picture, and the sounds of birds singing and traffic on the 101 get woven in as well. My mind does all this work constantly, building on all the similar work it has done for years, re-composing a coherent-seeming world in which I can continue to seek out the things I need and want, preserve myself from what I do not want, and tune out all the rest.

One surprising recognition I have had lately is that the world I perceive – the houses on the hillside across the valley and all that surrounds them – is not, in fact, truly separate from me in the way I typically assume. When I look, I find that there is no me apart from these sense impressions and the memory of similar experiences of contact back through time. And, like other human beings, I myself am the product of a long, complex evolutionary emergence that has shaped my eyes and ears and mind to receive the sense impressions out of which I weave this picture of the world. It would be just as true to say, in fact, that those sense impressions of the houses across the valley ARE me, at least as much as anything else – my memories, my image in the mirror, my name – are me. And this basic error, this mistaken assumption of separation, explains why the kind of self-interested engagement described above – where I seek more of what I like and less of what I don’t – is always a deeply frustrating experience. When I stop making this error – when I open to the way in which that hillside across the way is not separate from me – I experience a sense of presence that arrives with an intensity verging on the ecstatic, but that also remains stubbornly mundane. A shift take place, an easing of tension in my shoulders. Often, a small bubble of elation will rise from the center of my chest to lift the corners of my mouth. Something stops not-fitting would be one way to describe this experience, but, at the same time, the mortgage still needs to be paid, my daughter needs to be delivered to dance class on time, and, at any moment, the Spanish Inquisition may show up at my front door. But perhaps the most interesting thing about looking out and being greeted by a world not-separate from me is how the experience registers not as a new discovery but, rather, as the affirmation of something I have always known.

The kind of fleeting recognition I’m describing here happens more often when I’m alone. It’s more challenging to have this experience of non-separation when other people are around, and the reason for this is how confusing and mysterious it is that they too could be not-separate from the world, which suddenly includes me as one of its minor details. Above and beyond the abrupt and, in my view, totally scandalous demotion this represents for me, I really just don’t get it, don’t understand how I could be so central and also so peripheral at one and the same time. In my confusion I assume, quite embarrassingly, that I was imagining the whole not-separate thing. Immediately I collapse all the way back into a hard-shelled creature scuttling along in search of the best deal I can claw for myself in a long, competitive haggling with an uncaring world. My sense, lately, is that this subtle cycling through states of connection and collapse – analogous to the four stages of adaptive cycles I wrote about in Part 1 of this post – happens continually, right on the edge of my conscious awareness.

Lately, I’ve found it helpful to view this odd fact about other people – that they too are not-separate from the world of their experience – not so much as a puzzle I must solve, but rather as a mystery I can be curious about. It occurs to me that I experience then something like the sense of wonder that can be found in the wide eyes of infants when they catch your gaze – that studious intensity it’s so much fun to get lost in. For a baby to recognize another being looking down over the edge of the crib, they must already be entering what the influential psychologist Jacques Lacan termed the “mirror stage.”  This is when the period of “symbiotic” union with the world of experience ends and the child begins to impute his or her own existence as a separate ego-form or self based upon what he or she sees in the eyes of the Other. The infant will become very interested in how the eyes of the Other respond to what they see. If those eyes are lit up with love, kindness, perhaps even longing, a warm bath of comfortable endorphins will wash over the infant’s nervous system. And if the gaze of the Other is full of anger and aggression, a buzz of destructive adrenalin courses through the infant instead. As the child matures, he or she will begin to theorize about what causes positive versus negative reactions in the gaze of the Other.

It’s generally assumed that infant development is a series of steps in the “right” direction, the direction of “reality.” But some modern cognitive scientists, Francisco Varela, for example, tend to agree with the non-dual wisdom traditions of Asia that our sense of separation is itself deeply delusional. Lacan, certainly, viewed the mirror stage as the beginning of a long flight away from the real into the neurotic alienation that is viewed in the West as “normal” ego development. For Lacan, the confusion of the mirror stage is cemented by the acquisition of language, the symbol system that allows us to navigate the social sphere, but that also seals us from our own groundless being. After this fall from Eden we are pursued by a sense of lack and diminishment, and a longing for completion. In our confusion we do crazy, destructive things like construct huge civilizations that drag the planet toward what Paleontologists now refer to as the third “great extinction.”

“Emptiness is the ultimate protection,” the Tibetan saying goes. “Emptiness,” as you may know, does not refer to “void” but rather to “empty of form.” Knotted with philosophical subtleties, the idea basically underscores the way any object or separate thing can be viewed as a complex set of factors arising together in an interdependent fashion that includes your perception of it. Part of the reason it’s so hard to express the nature of “emptiness” elegantly in a post of this kind is that words themselves are so much about the separateness of things, the “form” aspect of the pen that is, insistently, a pen. From the point of view of Buddhist psychology both these poles of the pen – its form aspect, and its emptiness or co-emergent aspect – are equally valid. The famous “middle way” of Buddhism involves holding both extremes in mind at the same time. Our problem, our “suffering,” arises from our inability to maintain this balancing act. Specifically, we have a strong bias in the direction of form.

It’s easy to see the Darwinian survival value of this bias – seeing the “form aspect” of the cave bear galloping toward you is central to your ability to pass your genetic material on to future generations. Today, though, the interlocking challenges of environmental degradation and social injustice that threaten the species can be traced to this same bias. I’m persuaded that this little glitch in human software explains certain mysteries – such as how, on our astonishingly abundant jewel of a planet, we could be so bent on self-elimination, and be pursuing exactly that with such single-minded fervor and devotion. It seems fitting that the urgent issues confronting us would prove so difficult to solve precisely because they are so complex and emergent – so much a result of the interconnectivity our reductive rationalism – our bias in the direction of form – runs counter to. Time to rebalance, in other words, in the direction of a protective “emptiness.”

Many people find it easier to form an emotional relationship to a state of mind when it is reified into a deity figure. Do that with this slippery concept of “emptiness” and you end up with the deity worshipped for millennia in large parts of Asia – Shiva. In the West the ancient Greeks handed down to us a version of Shiva, and we call this deity Dionysus, god of madness and ecstasy. You might be more intimately familiar with Dionysus than you realize – Sigmund Freud smuggled him into the culture in the guise of the subconscious mind, which he derived, to some degree, from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. From this point of view, when you go visit a counselor or shrink you are actually talking to a kind of priest mediating your relationship to this powerful archetype.

For me, an even better place to worship Dionysus is at the theater. Whatever the specific content of the play or performance, what we cherish most, if only covertly, is the conjuring of an illusion of “reality” that we can experience fully, form and emptiness reconciled. Buttressing each other, shoulder to shoulder in our seats, we discover the courage to witness together the appearance of reality rising up out of nothing to dance for a while under the lights, and then dissolve again into nothing but the memory of our applause. Here we find Shiva, the dancer, who, in the Tantric traditions articulated over a millennium ago, weaves continuously through a cycle of creation, preservation, concealment, revelation and destruction. I find it comforting to note how well this sequence harmonizes with the four stages of adaptive cycles – rapid growth, conservation, collapse and renewal. The fact that some environmental thinkers have arrived at insights similar to those of ancient Asian wisdom traditions would seem to underscore the strength of these ideas, and to encourage us to revise our habits of mind accordingly.

Part One of this post was written as part of the Master program in Urban Sustainability at Antioch University Los Angeles. I imagined a conversation between the Post-war Marxist critic Raymond Williams and the Marina Alberti, an urban design professor at the University of Washington who applies complex systems thinking to urban eco-sytems. Click here for Part Two

I am meeting with Raymond Williams and Marina Alberti at the concrete picnic tables atop Mt. Hollywood. Mt. Hollywood is the crest of Griffith Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the world, and a crucial refuge for my wife and I since we moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. These hills are vitally alive. We’ve seen them shift and change with fires, floods, earthquakes – the whole SoCal array of environmental stressors. Visually, the park is a chaotic tangle of the natural and the manmade, marked by crumbling roads, cracked drainage ditches and culverts, looping power lines and grafitti-ed water tanks. The park also includes a multitude of jackrabbits, mule deer, owls, coyotes, hawks, rattlesnakes and pebbled, darting lizards. Latino families, elderly Asian speed walkers in shaded visors, amorous gay ramblers, and members of every other ethnic and social grouping travel the park’s roads and trails daily. The result is a dynamic, complex array of human and “natural” systems.

Williams, Alberti and I sit and look out across the Los Angeles basin and talk about the trajectory of history as it pertains to issues of sustainability. The view from the crest is panoramic, with vistas South toward the Catalina Islands, and then East to the smog banks that lie close against the distant San Gabriels. But we are not here just to enjoy the view.  Williams and Alberti have joined me to discuss my notion that ecology’s four stages of adaptive cycles – rapid growth, conservation, collapse and renewal – can be applied to psychological systems and processes, as well as to sociological and natural ones. If my idea is valid, I ask them, pointing to the city below, might it then be possible to construct a “unified theory” that elegantly explains the entire set of processes that have transformed the Los Angeles basin from sparsely populated semi-desert ranch land to a sprawling metropolis, within little more than a single human lifetime.

Williams opens the discussion by explaining how my idea about adaptive cycles and human psychology joins a long effort to reintegrate our thinking about man and nature. He goes on to review how man, eager to uncover the laws that govern natural systems, split off the idea of nature from that of God. The strange effect of this split was that Western man, in his ideas about himself, became progressively alienated from his own nature. “Most earlier ideas of nature had included, in an integral way, ideas of human nature,” Williams states, quoting himself. I suggest that the Tongva Indians who inhabited this region before our arrival would have found our habit of reifying the “environment” into a thing that needs to be defended or exploited to be a very eccentric view. Whether or not this holds true in the particular case of the Tongva, Williams responds, the salient issue has to do with how we relate to our own “nature.” To what degree are the forces driving unsustainable urban development manifestations of basic psychological dynamics such as ego development and alienation? Do we “reify” and split off from our own “nature” in the same way that, at the cultural level, we have separated from the environment? What would it mean to heal this inner split?

I ask Alberti for her response to these ideas. She and her partner Marzluff have described how urban ecosystems “consist of several interlinked subsystems – social, economic, institutional, and ecological.” Conspicuously absent from the list is the subsystem of individuals as psychological beings. And yet elsewhere Alberti and Marzluff have discussed the crucial importance “feedback mechanisms” between human decision makers and ecological processes, each informing and shaping the other. On the face of it, Alberti sees no reason why psychological well being can’t be defined in terms of “equilibrium,” “resilience” and “innovative response to crises.” But, she admits, the issue of psychology is problematic. Value statements about things like “well being” lead naturally toward prescriptive norms, and the specter of coercion begins to raise its head. Science is typically viewed as a refuge from this danger, a realm of fact, with values directed toward the separate realm of religion. But after nearly a century of scientific research into psychological dynamics, perhaps it would be possible to define a set of “green” psychological (or even neurological) factors in a pragmatic, empirical mode that doesn’t spin off in the direction of values. We at least can all agree that the resilience of the city spreading out at our feet would be enhanced by an understanding of the psychological systems that are helping to drive its continued development.

Given the recent midterm elections in the US, Williams is more pessimistic. Deep-seated psychological tendencies would certainly need to change before we could make a meaningful shift in the urban landscape toward sustainability. But the sheer historical momentum of coercive social relations leave Williams feeling skeptical that this is even a remote possibility. It’s all fine to discuss such ideas in the abstract, but real psychological opposition only manifests when there’s the threat of actual changes in who owns and controls which resources on a material level. The near certainty of environmental collapse, for example, has only fueled the determination of oligarchic forces in the US to darken the public mind with sophisticated disinformation and cognitive dissonance strategies. I ask Williams again about the four stages, and whether they relate in any way to the dialectical materialism of Marxist theory, where history proceeds by huge reversals, thesis and antithesis colliding always toward new syntheses, the entire process governed by social conditions. Progressives seem often to assume we are en route to a disruptive and traumatic collapse, and that, given our attachment to comfort and stability, deliberative processes will only take us so far. Who’s to say, however, that we won’t look back twenty years from now and discover that the “let ‘em eat cake” conservative intransigence of 2010 ended up energizing the movement to revise corporate law, unleashing a new era of progressive policy innovation?

While not exactly optimistic on this score, Alberti finds it interesting to think about resilience in terms of psychological and cultural analogues. What defines the “resilience” of an individual psyche as it relates, for example, to habits of consumption? What, on the level of individual psychology, echoes the “basin of attraction around a stable state?” Does the degree to which an individual psyche can tolerate alteration before “reorganizing around a new set of structures and processes” pertain in any meaningful way to sustainability? I point out how many of the cutting-edge green building initiatives originate today in Germany. Only 60 years ago Germany had been reduced to a field of rubble. Remade along with Germany’s infrastructure were the psychological paradigms that govern the Germans’ basic attitudes toward consumption and social justice. How much psychological resilience would be required by a similar shift in American sensibilities, and how might this resilience be cultivated? We need to understand how the demands of such an effort compare to the demands of coping with the environmental calamities that otherwise confront us.

Returning to my question about Marxism, Wiliams points out that the science of complex systems is so consistent with dialectics that it almost seems like an extension of it. He quotes the influential biologist Stephen Jay Gould about how Hegel’s laws concerning “interpenetrating opposites” and the “transformation of quantity to quality” line up closely with central tenants of the new science. The whole notion of a paradigm shift, where small quantitative changes accumulate in a stable system until finally forcing a rapid transition to a new state, arises from basic Hegelian dialectics. As Williams dryly points out, if there’s nothing new in complexity theory there’s little reason to expect policies that grow out of it to deliver new results. The task then becomes one of optimizing results given what’s possible. What simple actions can be taken, for example, to move us, even incrementally, toward a new paradigm defined by sustainability? It’s interesting to imagine visiting Mt. Hollywood another lifetime from now and looking out at a new kind city, one that balances economic dynamism with ecological viability. On a psychological level, what would be required to make that vision a reality? Or, to put it another way, is there any way to gain significant control over our urban future without an internal shift of this kind?

We discuss this further, Alberti suggesting that one feature setting complexity theory apart from dialectics is the concept of emergent form – how simple processes can generate new systems at much higher levels of complexity. There seems to be an adaptive capacity built into these emergent systems – they naturally seek to preserve, enhance and propagate themselves. Clearly, we’re back in the cycle here of growth, conservation, collapse and renewal that could usefully be applied to the processes by which we assemble our sense data, memory, emotion and thought into a public identity engaging in the social arena. Likewise, a truly sustainable city could turn out to be an “emergent form” produced by a multitude of small behavioral changes combined with larger paradigm shifts gathering force and complexity over the next few decades.

As a scientist, Alberti views elegance to be a feature of truth. She quotes the Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to support the idea that symmetry across different scales tends to be a reliable indicator of real advances in our understanding of scientific laws. In terms of ecology, symmetry would suggest the same basic dynamics are at work in psychological processes of individual actors as in the “natural” processes that govern fluxes and pools in urban areas like LA. In other words, we encounter the fundamental dynamics of over-consumption and environmental degradation as we navigate our lives and our relationships as psychological beings on a daily level. The advantage of arriving at some kind of clarity about this kind of “symmetry” is that steady, pragmatic steps could then be made toward a qualitative shift in the direction of sustainability.

When a part of my bookshelf came off its hinges, I emptied the shelf, removed it from the wall and put a picture in its place. Looking at the odd assortment of books on the floor, I endeavored to expand the project. Soon great stacks had to be negotiated in order to move from one end of the room to another. It was during the weeding out process (antiquated nonfiction like the Encyclopedia Britannica, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, texts on economics, perennial gardens and human health were to be boxed and donated ) that I came across In Cold Blood.  I had always meant to read In Cold Blood, but I was afraid of the material. Scary stuff, I thought. My edition was hardbound and dusty, the paper book sleeve yellowed and brittle, and the possibility of nightmares notwithstanding, the time was right.

Whether in a bookstore, public library or standing at my own book shelf, I always remember those first few minutes with a book – how it came into my hands.  And generally, after the first paragraph, I agree to see the work through and do my best to bring to it as much as it promises to bring me. I read In Cold Blood during my lunch hour. The quietest place I could find was my car, so every morning I would circle the subterranean garage for a spot under a light.  Secret and private, the garage was a good setting.

It seems there are at least three camps of Truman Capote readers. Those who have only read In Cold Blood, those who have read a selection of material including In Cold Blood, and those who have read some Capote but not In Cold Blood. I was in camp number three. Being apprehensive, I was relieved by the book’s structure. It assured me there would be no trickery and no surprises. There are four sections: The Last to See Them Alive, Persons Unknown, Answer, and The Corner. Page three tells you that four shotgun blasts ended six lives. It is straightforward writing. The complexities unravel as we alternately weave through the psychological portraits of all the characters. A gruesome tale, no doubt, but it is astounding how the writer, with even pacing and dogged persistence, reveals these people in all of their dimensions.

The details of Mrs. Clutter’s vulnerability are heart stopping.  One viewpoint is when she is at home with a local village girl and she asks, “Do you like miniature things?  Tiny things?” and upon showing the girl the ‘assorted Lilliputian gewgaws – scissors, thimbles, crystal flower baskets, toy figurines, forks and knives’, some of which she has had since childhood, she says that Mr. Clutter travels a great deal and that  it sometimes seems like he’s never home. She explains that little things really belong to you, that they don’t have to be left behind, you can carry them in a shoebox wherever you go. Ironically, it is Perry Smith’s large cardboard box shipped from Mexico to Nevada that contains the things he could not leave behind, including the evidence needed to convict him and Richard Hickock – two pairs of steel-buckled boots.

The murder of the Clutter family is both incomprehensible and believable. From Perry Smith’s childhood misery and neglect to his nearly split adult personality, we find a human being with only a vague sense of morality. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did”, he says to Dick. “There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that.”

Regardless of the genre, non-fiction novel, novella, short story or reportage, Capote captures raw human behavior from its most violent to the endearing and spiritual. In a short story called A Thanksgiving Visitor, the second grader, Buddy, of his nemesis Odd Henderson says, “the jealousy charging through me had enough power to electrocute a murderer. Murder was what I had in mind; I would have killed him as easily as swat a mosquito.  Easier.”  And from the same story, a portrayal of grace much along the lines of Mrs. Clutter and her curio collection, this time in the description of the protagonist’s aunt, Ms. Sook.  “Her distinguished face, with its delicate and clumsy features and beautiful, youthful eyes, bespoke a fortitude that suggested it was more the reward of an interior spiritual shine than the visible surface of mere mortal health.”

The works consistently talk about human frailty, neglect, cruelty, and often the resultant blurred ethics. Capote tells us we are not any one finite personality, but several at the same time. In Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex, there are only two characters; they bear the same initials as the author and negotiate insomnia, boredom, candor and truth. The story is partially the construction of a self interview and the questions include:

“What frightens you?”

“What can you do?”

“What are some things you can’t do?”

“Do you consider conversation an art?”

“Do you believe in God?”

This last question elicits the exasperation of the Siamese twin, TC, who does not believe the question was answered. TC responds, “It’s not that simple.  I did believe in God.  And then I didn’t.” However, god would help, if asked, he says.

“TC:  And has He?

TC:  Yes, More and more. But I’m not a saint yet.  I’m an alcoholic.  I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint. But I shonuf ain’t no saint yet, nawsuh.”

Reading the work of any great writer reaffirms what writers know.  Writing is not for the meek, timid or lazy of mind.  Writing is for the uncompromising.  Writing is a monkey on your back. In Capote’s preface to Music for Chameleons, he says it beautifully. “When God hands you a gift he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.  ….It was a lot of fun [writing] at first.  It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the difference between very good writing and true art; it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down!”

The man slowly materializes, broad-shouldered, out of the darkness upstage. As he strides toward us into the light we see that he’s wearing a business suit and that his feet are bare and his face tattooed in looping, Polynesian designs. He stands and looks out at us and then begins to dance, moving his large body in quick, birdlike steps and sudden pivots. He rolls his eyes and his long, pointed tongue unfurls in the demonic gestures of ritualized Maori warfare. And now the man begins to shout, a long passionate lament or exorcism in a language we don’t know. In his business suit the dancing, shouting man makes the familiar sight of the human figure strange again, full of mysterious capacities. You can feel a weight lifting, the weight of assumptions we make about our true nature, a set of errors we cling to out of blind momentum and the fear of change and where change comes from. This remarkable dance arrives toward the climax of Lemi Ponifasio /MAU: Tempest: Without a Body, a version of Shakespeare’s final play stripped of words but conveying the wild spirit that hovers around the periphery of the original.

The dancing, shouting man might be a version of Prospero, the shipwrecked sorcerer of Shakespeare’s play, or he might be a version of the enslaved native of the island, Caliban. Also on stage at various times are a stunted angel, a golden man writhing on his back, a continual procession of monk-like figures gliding in and out, a man moving with an animal gracefulness on hands and feet as the droning industrial score gathers and releases sonic energy – it’s hard to know exactly how to interpret Ponifasio’s staging, and probably a mistake to try. The effects are primal and dreamlike but you can also feel the presence of sophisticated critical discourse underneath, and in interviews Ponifasio is quick to cite the work of Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil and the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben as sources of inspiration. Ponifasio also describes The Tempest: Without A Body as a response to the way enemy combatants were stripped of legal rights in Post 9-11 America, a development whose disturbing implications we currently seem happy to ignore. But on a deeper level, what Ponifasio illuminates for me is a Western habit of mind that has come to haunt the human species. He is using the stage to cast a spell, a prayer for sanity, and a shamanistic lament. And the reason Shakespeare’s play is a good vehicle for this project is that Shakespeare himself was a kind of shaman casting spells, using the mechanism of the stage to do so.

It’s curious how things happen. Small shifts get magnified over time. Choices become habits, and then grow into patterns that unfold and are sustained for a few minutes or for years or centuries, before degrading again into what has no pattern. If the capitalist system that emerged from England shortly after Shakespeare’s era is a complex pattern of this kind, can we locate any one quality that expresses its essential nature? Addressing this question in his 2007 book The Enemy of Nature, the End of Capitalism or the End of the World, activist Joel Kovel writes, “Separation/alienation/splitting is the fundamental gesture of capital.” Kovel goes on to detail how this essential “gesture” permeates the structures and processes of Capitalism across the various scales.

How did this work in practice? The reductive, analytical frame of mind that characterized Enlightenment rationalism allowed mankind to tap or exploit the energy stored in various bonds across a broad spectrum of human experience — everything from the cultural “energy” stored in the social bonds of traditional societies, down through the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of the hydro-carbon molecules of fossil fuels, all the way down to the vast amounts of energy liberated by the ultimate “analytical” act – the splitting of an atomic nucleus. The culture of capital has always been about the breaking down of complex wholes into component parts that can then be reconfigured and re-combined in new and more efficient ways in order to generate growth. All well and good, perhaps, but it’s now clearly time to shift toward core values geared toward balance rather than toward endless growth. And just as Capitalism was based on the logic of analysis and separation, what replaces it will be based on the logic of unity and connection.

Watching Ponifasio’s work, I found myself wondering about the vast cultural patterns that lead back to the island off the coast of Europe where the historically potent citizens of England sat listening to The Tempest’s first production. What if the seed of these patterns is simply the habit of splitting heart and mind? This was a habit cultivated first among the scientists of that era – an esoteric subculture that emerged out of alchemists and other Prospero-like sorcerers. The English innovation, perhaps, was to embrace this radical gesture of splitting heart and mind and carry it broadly into other arenas in life. You can picture the scene. One day in the English countryside, a group of people looked at each other across cut stemware full of sherry and said, “What if what we’re really supposed to do is numb the heart.” Let’s give this group of earnest psychonauts the benefit of the doubt and assume they wanted to focus in, iris down, pull things apart in order to deliver change, solve problems, exert some control. “We’ll keep the mind alert but we’ll knock the heart hard with a mallet and put it to sleep. Then, later, the heart will wake up again and all will be well. Change will have happened.”

So they devoted themselves to the project, reminding themselves continually, “No, don’t feel that…!” And, “no, you can’t feel that either!” And the really devout among them, seeing God’s hand in this splitting of heart and mind, traded the mallet for a red hot wire with which to turn that tender heart into scar tissue. And it all seemed kind of ordained because, in fact, cauterizing their hearts conferred on them a kind of power, a power to make headway against problems such as disease and famine, but also power over other people too, the non-cauterized-heart people of the world. And when we jump ahead a couple of hundred years we see lots of powerful technologies and glittering machines…very little small pox or cholera…but also global warming, species extinction, deforestation and no end in sight to the machine of continual, unsustainable growth. Most troubling is that we are in the grip of the habit now, unable to access the freedom we once enjoyed with regard to our hearts and whether to cauterize them with red hot wires. The habit of self-heart cauterization on a mass scale – could it really be that simple, what ails us today?

Shakespeare, in my view, saw this pattern as it was just beginning to emerge in the Elizabethan culture of his day. Shakespeare, I believe, was alarmed by the potential consequences, the darker energies this newfound heart-cauterizing talent would tap. And he wrote a number of plays about it, Macbeth and Hamlet, King Lear and Julius Ceasar, and many others, ending with The Tempest. On the level of cultural psychology what we are talking about is an affective anxiety disorder playing itself out in historical time. We’ve never been able quite to handle our own capacity for awareness and the flood of compassion it brings with it. We are dependent as infants in ways that haunt us later in life. As a species we suffer from “abandonment issues.”  This root emotional wound governs our response to the Other and is thus the driver of all societal dysfunction, such as alienation, social injustice, the inequality of wealth, war and international conflict, and environmental degradation as well. Most of us are not even aware of this wound, despite the fact that it, more than any other factor, has given shape to our lives.

I’ve written elsewhere about how The Tempest can be viewed as a “poem to the emergent unity of the world,” a poem linked to the science of complex systems and the new paradigm that science contains. And, for me, Ponifasio’s work participates in the move toward this new paradigm. Watching the play made me think that, in a paradoxical way, a world stripped of its sacred spaces is a world that has become entirely sacred. And that if you strip our lives of rituals what happens is that our lives become entirely ritualistic. If the planet is quickly becoming a necrotic mass of toxicity and broken eco-systems we must remember that history is never a fixed affair. What happens next colors and revises the meaning of all that has gone before. If the current blackening is the prelude to a greater flourishing some decades down the line, the actions we take now will seem providential rather than futile. Who knows, perhaps there is no way for us to avoid our own salvation. Viewed this way, the challenge ahead becomes perhaps a little less daunting.