Prospero's Books

It's called literature

From John Horgan's response to a letter in the May-June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit:

Many so-called emergent phenomena can be understood, at least partially, through conventional reductionist methods. Particle physics has yielded extraordinary insights into the origin, composition, and evolution of the entire cosmos. Molecular biology has illuminated once opaque mysteries such as conception, heredity, and speciation. But some emergent phenomena, notably that of the human mind, stubbornly resist reductionist analysis. Fortunately we do have a "different methodology" for understanding ourselves. It's called literature (6).

You're the closest one around

Last week I attended a workshop at the Eiteljorg Museum by photographer Ted Orland. Several of his aphorisms (almost verbatim, I think):

• Lead an interesting life. The art will take care of itself.
• Shoot first and ask questions later.
• Everything in the world has been photographed.
• God created Yosemite. Man created Yosemite National Park.
• Someone has to do your work, and you're the closest one around.

Whence came you?

On XM Radio's vintage radio channel, I stumbled on an old series that I'd never heard of: Quiet, Please. In the episode being played is an exchange that will interest my Masonic readers. The narrator, Austin, an Indiana Jones prototype working in Egypt, is showing his friend Abe around a dig site:

ABE FELDMAN: Oh.  What does this say?

AUSTIN: What?

ABE FELDMAN: Uh, this slab here.

AUSTIN: Let's see. Uh... (reads and slowly translates) 'Here was I... Ho-Tep,
presented with a...' I guess you'd say, 'invested with... the working tools of
those who... build.  In my hand, I, Ho-Tep, did take' -- uh -- 'took... the
tools of the second...' -- uh -- 'grade... of workmen in stone, the,' -- uh -- 
'plumb, the square, and the...'

ABE FELDMAN: The level, huh? 

AUSTIN: How'd you know?

ABE FELDMAN (amazed): There were Masons in those days.

AUSTIN: Well, sure.  How do you think they built all this stone stuff?

The series, which aired from 1947 to 1949, was the creation of writer Wyllis Cooper, an active Freemason. So my Masonic readers, knowing well the language of Masonic ritual, will not be surprised that this episode, titled "Whence Came You," begins with the line "I came from Jerusalem."

(Audio and text files of this episode [number 37] and others are available on the fan site Quiet, Please.)

Alas, poor Yorick

Perhaps the most recognizable image from all of Shakespeare's plays is that of Hamlet contemplating a skull--the skull of Yorick, the court jester.

Why Yorick? While rereading Hamlet for my current "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I've come to understand one possible reason. The court of Claudius, the elder Hamlet's murderer and usurper, is a court without a jester--a court without anyone who can (to quote an old Quaker phrase) "speak truth to power."

One of the ways that Claudius's Denmark is corrupt is that information flow--essential to the continued existence of any system--has been distorted or blocked. (I count at least seven instances in the play of an attempt to gather information through deceit.)

I'll bet that after Yorick's death, the elder Hamlet's court continued to include jesters. But Claudius's court does not--until young Hamlet comes home. Hamlet's "Mousetrap" play can be seen as a replacement for the jests of a court fool. When this play-within-a-play restores some information flow, showing Claudius as he really is, Claudius panics and stops the show.

Something is rotten in the state--the system--of Denmark. Hamlet tries to restore that system to health by opening communication channels again. But he's too late, and the system collapses. Systems are often defined by contrasting them with mere heaps. The heap of bodies at the end of Act V provides a perfect illustration of the difference.

Our breaking and slashing of God

Kester Brewin, at The Complex Christ, has been posting an interesting series of reflections on, among other things, the shift in power that occurs when hunter-gatherer economies are replaced by agricultural economies. From the latest in that series:

Bread is not the simplest thing to make. Leavened, it requires careful control of yeasts, and to make in any quantity, a good supply of grain and a means of controlled heat.

Wine requires more technology still. Large quantities of grapes need to be harvested, and these need proper storage to age and mature.

In other words, the Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style - settled food production - over another - hunting and gathering.

Perhaps this is benign, being so long in our history in the making, but I wonder if, in these times when our relationship to the planet is so fragile we might reflect on the Eucharist as a sort of lament for our abuse of the world, just as we might use it to lament for our breaking and slashing of God.

A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?

Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

His initial suggestion: TV and film writer Aaron Sorkin--a great candidate. Over at The Shakespeare Teacher, Bill and his readers suggest others.

In my Conversations with Shakespeare course, I lead students through half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as well as later works in explicit "conversation" with them: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Cesaire's A Tempest, Gaiman's Sandman treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others. The course ends with a play that I find the most "Shakespearean" of recent dramas: Tony Kushner's Angels in America. My students always find lots of ways that Angels is in implicit, if not explicit, conversation with the Bard.

So Kushner's my candidate--not in the quantity of his output, but in his almost unique ability (among many others) to give his subjects both cosmic and fractal dimensions. If you haven't read or seen the play, do so (especially the amazing HBO film of it), and see if you agree.

Make the path as you walk

Several years ago I sat in on a colleague's course in 20th century Spanish literature. The course pushed the limits of my Spanish, but it was worth the effort, in part because it introduced me to one of my now favorite poets, Antonio Machado.

Monday, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore quoted Machado:

Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.

Gore continued:

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures—each a palpable possibility—and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The cosmic dance which is always there

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)

       

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues

The best Christmas meditation I've read so far this year comes from Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of the Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre in Bethlehem, as quoted in the always inspiring Signs of Emergence blog:

Every homeless refugee, desperate for a bed for a night, understands the agony of Joseph of Bethlehem.

Every frightened teenage girl, pregnant and lost, comprehends the bewilderment of Mary.

Every executive, trying to reconcile commercial realities with moral imperatives, identifies with the local innkeeper.

Every working person, in a daily routine awakening to a sudden reverence for life, experiences the awe of the Judean shepherd.

Every ruler or intellectual, coming to the limit of human power, evinces the humility of the Magi.

Every tyrant who keeps in control by means of ruthless and harsh practices knows the insecure fear of Herod.

Every infant, born on the rubbish heap of a city slum, shares the indignity of the Holy Birth.

Bethlehem speaks in many tongues....

Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).