All posts by Gildas Hamel

Flight

A flock of pigeons searches the heavenly lexicon, flips incomprehensibly and alights on the wires. Bachelard is my safety as I walk under these sage, whiffling incarnations of flight on the guano-pocked sidewalk. The air and its dreams suspend materiality and I hang far below cement, beyond safe ways, by a gleaming stream.

Peace-making war

In another unreflective and pro-war article, Letting women reach women in Afghan War, the NYT illustrates how army managers and think tanks related to the Pentagon are now using all our human capacities for empathy, including women’s traditional roles, in order to achieve means that are *power*-related. It is the other side of our economic world in which everything becomes commodified, including the most intimate aspects of life, such as friendship. We are in Afghanistan not only to prevent the return of Taliban and to destroy Al Qaeda, but also to make sure Pakistan’s situation doesn’t deteriorate further, to be a massive presence all along the border south of Russia (Caspian oil has become important), and to try to control Iran East (Afghanistan), West (Irak), and South (Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean where we maintain a fleet at all times), not to mention be a reminder to China that we are the top dog when it comes to energetic sources. The first objectives (Taliban-Al Qaeda) are a cover for the second galaxy of objectives, which are little talked about. It is interesting that our army is trying to be humanitarian in an area (Helman province) where in the fifties Brits and US already tried to be humanitarian for similar reasons (building dams and irrigation systems, but also worried about Iran which was nationalizing its oil industry: Dr Mossadegh was murdered, apparently with US help, to avoid that).

But back to the use of humanitarian means: giving food, medicine, talking to women and children. Of course, no matter the “cultural sensitivity training”, the locals are surely not confused about the exercise of power! Guns aplenty outside, planes that hit civilians occasionally overhead (automated drones often)… Is it surprising then that true NGOs find themselves under suspicion of being agents of imperialism or “the West,” and their volunteers may become victims of violence? I would like to see more discussion of these issues in our papers, but even the NYT doesn’t go there, or rarely.

Another trinity

We can dream of what the notion of the trinity could have become if Syriac and Aramaic had overrun the Mediterranean, rather than Greek and Latin. A clue is given by the beginning of Ode of Solomon 19, a text usually dated to the 2d c. CE:

1. A cup of milk was offered to me,
And I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness.
2. The Son is the cup,
And the Father is He who was milked;
And the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
3. Because His breasts were full,
And it was desirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom,
and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
[…]

(translation by J. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, Scholars Press, 1977, p. 82). I would have translated 3: “and there was no doubt that his milk would be poured out in sufficiency”. Still a Father doing everything in life and sustaining life, and a Son transmitting power, but at least a female Spirit. Alas, the constraints of translation were such that the LXX writers had chosen way before this text to have neuter Greek πνευμα for feminine Hebrew רוח: not ψυχή, the nightly-visited goddess. From neuter pneuma to masculine spiritus, what other option was there?

At the office

A large skein of pelicans high in the sky lifts
petal-shedding plum trees from their pebble moorings.
Human figures speak scriptured echoes of linguistic laws:
swiss january signs that
the cawing of ravens will soon silence.
An infinity of blooms and specks of sun
are jealously guarded in my miqraot gdolot text,
pressing against the dark ink.

Nature et évangile dit de Jean

Sur la science moderne: un cosmologiste du MIT pousse l’idée sage et peut-être johannique que les mathématiques ne décrivent pas l’univers, elles sont l’univers même (ou la phrase devrait être inversée?). Prendre cette idée au sérieux est envisager des mathématiques infinies. Mais cela ne contredirait pas Augustin par exemple qui pensait que l’espace-temps, attribut de cette existence, était né avec l’univers: donc peut-être aussi leur mathématisation, ou être même? Belle citation prise à Stephen Hawking: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” (A brief history of time). Mais on voit aussi un étrange nominalisme pointer, par exemple lorsque Sean Carroll, cosmologue (?) à Caltech dit: “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception”. Mais qu’est-ce que cette nature qui obéit à des lois: seraient-elles donc étrangères à cette nature?

Conservative bible

A new translation of the Bible is in the works. It is called the “new conservative bible”. The guidelines are unsurprising: avoid Liberal Bias at all costs (note the capitalization), don’t emasculate (no gender inclusive language), no dumbing down (tall order), use (they say “utilize”) Powerful Conservative Terms (those capitals again), combat Harmful Addiction (use “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; will that stop Wall Street?), do not downplay the very real existence of hell or the devil (capitals, but I’m getting tired), express Free Market Parables (Looking Forward to the Translation of the Story of jesus Kicking Salesmen Out of the temple), exclude Later-inserted Inauthentic Passages (ah, the adulteress story is out: too easy for liberals to use), etc… etc…

Looking forward to translations of she the spirit doing things, such as “she fluttered over the waters” in Genesis…. Or are our conservatives going with Latin translations of ruaḥ as masculine spiritus? Fun.

A quote to finish with this silly topic: “Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the “social justice” movement among Christians.”

Misprisions of utopia

which is the title of a talk by Paul Bové, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh: Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: Fri Jan 29, 2010, 2–3pm, at UCSC, Humanities Bldg 1, Room 520.

Paul Bové has published such books as: Destructive poetics: Heidegger and modern American poetry (Columbia University Press, New York, 1980); Intellectuals in power: a genealogy of critical humanism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986); In the wake of theory (Wesleyan University Press, 1992); Mastering discourse: the politics of intellectual culture (Duke University Press, Durham, 1992); Early postmodernism: foundational essays (Duke University Press, Durham, 1995); Edward Said and the work of the critic: speaking truth to power (Duke University Press, Durham, 2000); Poetry against torture: criticism, history, and the human (Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2008).

The last title brings me to Czeslaw Milosz,

In Warsaw
….
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything: five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

(Warsaw, 1945, from New and collected poems, 1931–2001 [Harpercollins, 2001])

Values in economics

Well, well. Perhaps I talked too soon this morning, in the course on the gospel of John, about the assumptions made in economics and psychology:

Daniel Friedman, Professor of Economics, will be giving the 44th annual lecture sponsored by the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate: Beyond Fear and Greed: The Moral Roots of Financial Crises. Drawing on his 2008 book, Morals and Markets, tracing financial markets all the way back to our human origins, Professor Friedman shows why these markets have become so powerful, how they grew out of the imperative to expand trust from family and friends to wider and wider circles, how instabilities arise, and suggests some ways to mitigate future financial disasters.

This will be Monday, February 1, 2010, at 8:00 pm, in the Music Recital Hall at Performing Arts (UCSC).

On the quickening of time

It starts with a quote of Lévinas in the chapter “Sans nom” de Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 144:

Quand les temples sont debout, quand les drapeaux flottent sur les palais et que les magistrats ceignent leur écharpe—les tempêtes sous les crânes ne menacent d’aucun naufrage. Ce ne sont peut-être que les remous qui provoquent, autour des âmes bien ancrées dans leur havre, les brises du monde. La vraie vie intérieure n’est pas une pensée pieuse ou révolutionnaire qui nous vient dans un monde bien assis, mais l’obligation d’abriter toute l’humanité de l’homme dans la cabane, ouverte à tous les vents, de la conscience. Et certes, il est fou de rechercher la tempête pour elle-même, comme si “dans la tempête résidait le repos” (Lermontov).

Mais peut-on risquer que la “morale … tout entière” de l’humanité tienne dans un “for intérieur”, un piètre havre où on ne peut s’amarrer qu’à une pauvre bosse, une petite voix intérieure subjective? C’est “le risque dont dépend l’honneur de l’homme”, dit Lévinas page 145. Et il continue: “C’est peut-être ce risque que signifie le fait même que dans l’humanité se constitue la condition juive” (souligné par Lévinas).

Il me semble qu’à la suite du judaïsme, avec le christianisme, et également dans son sillage, l’humanité est en effet “au bord de la morale sans institutions.” Depuis plusieurs siècles, surtout depuis le XVIIIème à un rythme toujours plus accéléré, le monde est en état (ou voie) de désenchantement pour parler comme Weber (et Marcel Gauchet après lui). Mais ce désenchantement ou “pealing away” d’un sentiment de sacré qui auréolait un certain nombre d’objets: institutions, personnes choisies, lieux et temps, mène peut-être—c’est un espoir—à un réenchantement plus profond, subtil et universel.