Posts tagged gestures and postures

I have to say from the examples I find the Western version of the holy fool a bit more attractive than the more common (and more exceedingly counter-cultural) Eastern counterpart. But holy foolishness is certainly a posture of culture-making, mixing elements condemnation and creation.

re: cultural worlds, fools, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, humor, saints

Nate:

It is not necessary to be Russian in order to appreciate holy fools however it seems to help.

There is a long tradition of fools for Christ’s sake in both Western and Eastern Christendom, containing both real fools and fools ex officio. In the West for example, St. Francis of Assisi exhibited some of the characteristics of holy folly, as did the order he founded. But it is Eastern Orthodoxy especially in Russia, that has produced the richest collection of holy fools. In the case of Russia the argument could actually be made that holy folly became a major theme in the national culture, both oil the popular and literary levels Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot being the undisputed literary climax of the tradition). Holy folly in the Eastern church may go back to the early days of the desert saints of Egypt, but the phenomenon became prominent in the sixth century Famous cases are those of Theophilus and Maria of Antioch, and of St. Symeon of Emesa Theophilus and Maria came from aristocratic families. They were engaged to be married, instead decided to become fools for Christ’s sake. They roamed the streets of the Syrian metropolis, he dressed as a jester, she as a prostitute, outraging the populace with bizarre and often obscene behavior. Gradually, it was recognized that this behavior was an expression of unusual piety. St. Symeon was an anchorite in the lands east of the river Jordan. He too began to roam through the towns and villages of this area. He would throw walnuts at people in church, overthrow the stalls of street vendors, dance with prostitutes in the street, burst into women’s bath houses and conspicuously eat on fast days. At first, of course, the reaction to this behavior was outrage. Then it came to be accepted that the behavior symbolized great religious mysteries…

A century ago, it was common for practicing Catholics to only accept the Eucharist once a year, but to go to confession regularly. Now, apparently, it's just the opposite. The reasons behind this are myriad, of course, but at least part of gets at Andy's idea of a posture of cultural consumption supplanting the sorts of disciplines that must be cultivated with diligence and work.

re: cultural worlds, discipline, gestures and postures, grace, reconciliation

Nate:

The biggest barrier between Catholics and the confessional, however, may be the real effort it requires. Unloading your transgressions on the Internet takes a few computer clicks—you can do it on your coffee break. But done right, Catholic confession demands a rigorous examination of conscience and real contrition, to say nothing of the prayers you may be assigned for penance and the thinking a priest may ask you to do about the ways you’ve let yourself and God down. No wonder we are more comfortable with the Eucharist service, which demands only that we line up like consumers and accept something for free. Dorothy Day wrote of having to “rack your brain for even the beginnings of sin.” That’s work.

This just sings.

re: creation, fire, gestures and postures, literature, virginia, water

Nate:

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, “Come down to the water.” It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

I love studies of animal language precisely because, of course, they're generally really just as much about human language and culture. The generous, absurd gesture of translating a Babylonian epic into ape-ish just underscores the point.

re: animals, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, language, literature, poetry, translation

Nate:

There’s been increased interest lately in monkey languages after discoveries were made about how putty-nosed monkeys combine sounds to create a basic syntax:

* Hack-hack-hack-hack: “There’s an eagle over there!” * Pyow-hack-hack-pyow-pyow-pyow: “I’ve seen a leopard, let’s move away!” * Hack-hack-hack-pyow-hack-hack-hack-hack-hack “There’s an eagle over there, let’s move away!”

But research at the Great Ape Trust using the sign language Yerkish reveals the primates are capable of far more linguistic sophistication. Primate Poetics sets out a manifesto to enrich this new language, starting, ambitiously, with a translation of the epic Gilgamesh:

“We will learn Yerkish. We will translate human literature into Yerkish. We will invent words, word-tricks, word-jokes, word-games to show the apes new ways of using (their) language. We will become knowledgeable and original enough to be invited by the researchers of the Great Ape Trust to read our Yerkish translation of Gilgamesh to Kanzi, Panbanisha and all the others.

“We are not here to compare and to compete with the ape but to appreciate its language for its own beauty. This is emphatically not about some lone genius monkey penning the Great Primate Novel.”

A closing zinger from the obituary of Robert Giroux, editor and publisher of many of my favorite writers (Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Conner, to name a few).

re: community, failure, gestures and postures, writing

Nate:

His ambition to write may have prompted an exchange with T. S. Eliot, then in his late 50s, on the day they met in 1946, when Mr. Giroux, “just past 30,” as he recalled the moment in “The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes,” was an editor at Harcourt, Brace. “His most memorable remark of the day,” Mr. Giroux said, “occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied, ‘Perhaps, but so are most writers.’“

The second twentieth-century figure that John Stackhouse examines in Making the Best of It is Reinhold Niebuhr, and he includes this striking summary of what Niebuhr called "sensuality" by Robin Lovin. The wording is turgid, but the point is profound. (And points to Lovin for not just going for the easy example of "fast-track" business executives, but pointing out that this can happen to scholars too.)

re: gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, john stackhouse, reinhold niebuhr

Andy:

Those who find their work meaningless and who lack significant personal relationships will find much encouragement in a consumer-oriented society to devote themselves to new forms of gadgetry and to establish a firm decorative control over their limited personal environment. These evasions of freedom, along with the forms of indulgence more usually associated with “sensuality,” must be seen as genuine forms of sin.

. . . We must also identify a form of institutional sin that elicits sensuality or sloth from persons by demanding commitments that preclude responsible attention to the range of choices and responsibilities that they ought to be attending to for themselves. The “up or out,” “publish or perish” career trajectories imposed by businesses, law firms, and academic institutions provide familiar examples of this sort of pressure. . . . Those who yield to these pressures are often pictured as ambitious, “fast-track” achievers whose chief temptation would seem to be to emulate the pride of their seniors and superiors. In fact, however, their achievements are often expressions of sensuality and sloth. The rising executive or scholar abandons the difficult balancing of obligations that marks a life of freedom constrained by human finitude, and substitutes a single set of goals defined by outside authorities.

One of the pleasures of being away for two weeks is coming back to several issues of the Economist to read at once. (Yes, I am a geek.) In the issue of 7 August is this remarkable article about the decline of Russia's "intelligentsia." Even by the Economist's high standards it is an unusually penetrating study of cultural change, and a reminder that "soft power" is often more effective than brute force—in this case, effective in restraining criticism of the state. And while the situation in the United States could not be more different in some respects, I still find these closing paragraphs worth pondering: a warning for any movement that seeks to be, in Tim Keller's phrase, "a counterculture for the common good."

re: elites, gestures and postures, power, russia

Andy:

The sense of success and inclusion is harder to resist than the wrath of the state. Carrots are more corrupting than sticks. This phenomenon is powerfully described in Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” (1960). One of its central characters is Viktor, a talented physicist who stoically defends his science in the face of likely arrest, but becomes weak and submissive when Stalin calls him to wish him success. “Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself—but now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies.” . . .

Russia today is much freer than it was for most of the Soviet era. However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, “Nobody has been commanded to lie down—and everyone is already on the ground.” The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin’s pressure. Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian journalist who works for a state TV channel, admits: “There is no person who tells [me] what you can and what you can’t do. It is in the air. If you know what is permitted and what is not, you’re in the right place. If you don’t, you are not.”