I’m looking at the entrance to a clothing store on Pacific Avenue. It is strange to think that this action, to enter someone else’s property and rifle through “their” clothes (owned in what way?), not necessarily because one needs new ones, is taken to be normal, benign, necessary even.

Washington: a few thousand scholars are gathered within the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion to talk about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, assorted methods to query the object (religion), and parenthetical enterprises like archaeology. So many books on the bible, exegesis, moral theology, etc.: would Jesus have been surprised? Lichtenberg was not.

On my way back along K street, I glance at the windows of a Catholic Association’s bookstore: a new book on the greatness of christianity and how it has enriched the world materially is out. On a stone sill in the second window next to last, I can only guess a human form under a large blanket, sleeping in the cold.

More on the monuments to the dead and the political center: when one walks the whole length of the Mall and back, one can’t help but think that the White House, the Capitol and other political organizations of the state are the pullies of an engine that partly comes to life, better, that draws much of its life from the glorified dead of previous wars (Arlington cemetery across the river, the Vietnam Memorial, now the Holocaust monument, etc.). Round and round it goes, gathering steam from its contact with the magic transformation of tears and nightmares into hopes. Is this any different from what the Kremlin did and does when it momified and keeps on re-presentation the body of Lenin? Any different from the late Roman re-inscribing of the body of Jesus, the cross, etc. into the landscape of what became the “holy land?” Any different from the cult of relics, the cult of the shroud of Turin since the fourteenth century?

That aspect of politics is a radical problem if confronted to some of the most important texts in the Hebrew bible and the Christian canon. The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 questions precisely the compulsion to glory and the fascination for the magic, frightening, pity-producing, and violence-justifying machinery that ancient and modern societies invoke in their effort to ground politics as usual. Isaac was not sacrificed, pace some commentaries. Neither was Ishmael? And more on bodies: that of Moses, the Solon-like law giver, was buried but is not to be found “to this day,” says Deuteronomy 34.6, no matter the Nebi Musa tomb in the slopes above Jericho. That of Elijah is even more fleeting, in life (a resident! an interstitial body) and even more in death. And to crown it all: the story of Jesus’ end, the story of the resurrection, is first and foremost the precise account of an absent body. It has a corrosive effect on the ever-renewed attempts to practice a politics of relics, pace Bush et al. The body politic is elsewhere, beyond the touch of the naïve and beyond the hypocritical attempts by the greedy to profit from human sufferings.

On passe dans les rues à côté de gens sans domicile. Quel sens cela a-t-il d’aller voir les oeuvres à la National Gallery? Je me retrouve au beau milieu d’énormes concrétions émaillées secrétées par des corps doués d’une énergie bien mal dirigée. Vastes bureaux dont le financement suffirait à mettre d’aplomb tous les miséreux des Etats-Unis? Non. D’autres pauvres viendront, ou nous en ferons. Ils seront toujours avec nous, un appel pour leurs frères plus chanceux.

Washington Memorial, face à la Maison Blanche. Trouz ar moteuriou en-dro deomp: ur c’hwezh, un heklev eus labour milionou a dud. Entre les deux centres du pouvoir, ou les poulies principales, une grande bande d’histoire, en défilé de galeries. Pour élever l’âme? C’est-à-dire pour former les désirs polymorphes et polytèles de millions qui y passent, les tirer vers le haut, une expansion de l’âme qui ne peut être qu’en contradiction avec les murs (les concrétions) érigés au sein du processus de pompage des énergies humaines, et du fond de cette contradiction pouvoir sentir comme Augustin l’appel à servir, à répondre à la souffrance humaine.

Je vais au Vietnam Memorial comme Américain, encore français de culture et de tête, mais le coeur partagé. C’est moi aussi que ces gens ont cru défendre, et je leur dois le respect, quelles qu’aient pu être leurs opinions de la guerre, une guerre menée par la propagande politique. Le mémorial s’enfonce dans la nuit des temps. Des poussières viendront en faire un tumulus. Où est le mémorial des Vietnamiens de tous bords également fauchés ou marqués par le “grim reaper”? C’est ce qu’avait voulu marquer l’étudiante à l’origine du monument: pas d’inscriptions, une pierre mémoire. Une compagnie de film tourne une publicité qui a le monument à Washington pour fonds de scène. Voilà une des poussières futures: il en sera fait de semblables près du monument aux morts du Vietnam dans quelques générations.
Réflexions sur la vénération des tombeaux….
Le bassin près du Lincoln Memorial, discret, mais “expliqué” (une manie américaine, fruit d’un complexe aussi?) comme une imitation des bassins de Versailles, etc. Pour moi, c’est tout simplement le ciel sur la terre, ou dans la terre, du moins un moment, celui des amoureux sur un banc public, dont le baiser est le signe d’une suspension des hostilités à l’infini.
Face au Smithsonian, quelques concessionnaires d’origine chinoise, il me semble, peut-être même vietnamiens? De l’autre côté, un bâtiment grotesque, néo-classique, probablement le secrétariat au commerce ou quelqu’entreprise de ce ce genre. Au tympan de gauche, un bel homme solide à la bite naturellement proportionnée, plus grande que sur les statues grecques. Sur le tympan de droite, la femme est belle également, de beaux seins ronds bien détachés, un ventre encore lisse, mais son corps, surtout les jambes, est nettement moins musclé que chez l’homme dont les genoux et les mollets se détachent nettement. Je ne continue pas à regarder par crainte d’être pris pour un voyeur.

Another thing I didn’t say Saturday: that the quiet, unrecognizable forgiving that lies at the heart of my being, I mean that makes it possible, has a face. To see a face that comes from a soul and not from a mechanics of forgiveness, requires the eyes and ears of the soul. How can I accept the notion of being forgiven, how can I listen to this music? And if I do, what is justice going to be? What am I going to do: give of this impossibly proprietary “myself” in return, in the space opened by forgiveness, a response therefore? It is a response to a call, a “dialectical” seeking of each other, from which flow covenants and contracts that found institutions, laws and codes.

What do an act of forgiveness (an “act,” how frozen already in the isolating tagging of our languages, how calculating, how habit-creating and secure) and the second partita of Bach have in common? Does the uniqueness of each reverberate in a similar fashion through consciousness? One can’t write another ciaconna (but adapt it, as for piano, the piece Hélène Grimaud played this week at the Carnegie) or repeat the act of forgiveness, without destroying (attempting to destroy) the original, but one can play it forever, everyday, with an ever renewed pleasure, and act from within the shelter, aura, reverberating spirit of a once created forgiving. There is no limit to the replaying of a once created vision. Another question lurks in the background: does the partita move me because I’ve heard a kind of music and singing that prepares me to recognize the arrangement of chords as a new dramatic creation? and the forgiving by another I also recognize as a dramatic re-creation of an all-too defined world, a known, or thought known, world of relationships and social structures.
But how does this play in another culture, say India? another music, another forgiveness?

Dec’h, war ur bank e skolaj Cowell, dirak ar mor:

an daoulagad digor
a glask dre ar gweledva
un ene kuzhet pell
en tu-all d’ar golo, d’an trouz ha da fiñv ar vuhez.
skrammoù gwer an deiz a sav war an aod
a-us d’an tossennoù ha menezhioù sec’h
e-lec’h en em vesk mouezhioù ha selloù

Une machine voyante, חוֹזֶה, avec une âme: nous croyons savoir ce qu’est une machine: un réseau ou tissu de règles plus ou moins amovibles. Dans la préface à la traduction en anglais d’une grosse collection de ses poèmes, Czeslaw Milosz écrit:

The history of the twentieth century prompted many poets to design images that conveyed their moral protest. Yet to remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry …. (Introduction to his New and collected poems, 1931–2001. New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Les deux petits rats grignotent, tournent, remontent dans leur hamac bleu, se grattent, alors qu’une pluie lente et parcimonieuse a déjà trempé l’herbe sous le pommier et que la sixième suite jouée par Navarra m’emporte.

I found it strange to vote today: the list of candidates and propositions was very long, the process cumbersome. One had to link the two severed parts of an arrow in the hope of signifying one’s choice. No signature, no filling of a rectangle, no punching holes, no cross in a box…. I haven’t totalled the sum in billions that the propositions put before Californian voters would entail if all passed, but it looked pretty frightening: 40 billions or so? We already have been issuing bonds to pay the interest on previous bonds or shortfalls. To present this raising of money as “no taxes” is a strange act of magic. “No taxes now” would be more accurate. The voter’s pamphlet has an analysis of cost and relation of debt to budget that is enlightening: it shows that the share of the California budget taken by interest payment has been going up steeply since the early nineties, dipping somewhat in the mid-nineties (bubble — better revenues), and going up again since (towards 6%). It also seems to suppose that no new bonds are going to be issued in the future, meaning that the curve comes to rest gently again towards a no debt payment point. Who is naïve enough to believe this?

What do we do in the Humanities? I mean, in those classes and language-centered activities classified and pluralized on our UCSC administrative shelves as philosophy, literature, history, history of consciousness, linguistics, American studies, feminist studies, language and writing? Are they immaterial, uncompetitive (gasp) and self-defeating activities that a little engineering might revitalize? Yes they are, I’m afraid, and I can’t help, because looking for the "vital" in revitalize is deadening, as poems and prophetic-style literature keep reminding me.
Speaking of poems, here is one I like by Eugenio Montejo:

The Mill
Turn your blades, old mill, grind
without pause the hours of these days
tossing off husks.
Erase the poems in which I lied,
words that didn’t rise like fingernails
from my flesh; erase
the black guitar of my shadow,
failing to sing as it goes.
Grind this room full of books,
crush its walls stone by stone
until the window alone lifts like a bird
and bears me off on its wings.
Continue to turn at the edge of the world
between my eyes and the wide field.

(translation by Kirk Nesset,
*The Kenyon Review* 28.3[2006], 37)

The text of this strategic plan is available http://www.ucsc.edu/administration/evc/academic_affairs.html here. Page 28, in the section on the division of humanities, one reads that the third priority is to “maintain the strengths of the Language and Writing programs to continue academic service curriculum.” What do those last words exactly mean? The language program has lost many of its third-year courses, has also lost most of the equivalencies it had to do the follow-up and advising of students in their majors, and has seen the number of students enrolled in its courses jump from an average 17 to an average or 24 in about 4-5 years. The students need more third- and fourth-year courses that should be designed as widely as possible (theater, literature, sociology, history, etc.).

Personal and person, from Latin [i]persona[/i], theatrical mask (perhaps from Etruscan φersu. On my way to campus, I see four workers putting the last touch to a landscaping job. I have noticed them at work for a couple months now, removing the old soil, re-doing the retaining walls, installing a fountain, new smooth walls, painting them ochre, putting new soil, special grasses, bushes, and trees. The name of the landscaping company that employs them appeals to the person-enhancing aspect of its business, meaning that the personality of the owner of the property is ideally reflected in the landscaping job. And perhaps it is…. It might be a better reflection of the workers’, no matter their lack of access to similar property, propriety, and personality.