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haha, nervously
Oct. 6th, 2007 09:55 amMy username on both Livejournal (in Latin) and Blogspot/Blogger (in English) is “little joke.” (For the finding of this inspired pun on my artpapers.org username jcullum, I shall be grateful to Grady Harris for so long as the emotion of gratitude is possible to me.) In the case of the counterforces blog, I am further gratified that those who suppose they can find my blog under littlejoke will locate instead a blog in Chinese by someone who writes it under a different username.
The advantage of being forever forever tongue-in-cheek, without inserting the smiley “joke” emoticon, is that it allows for the presentation of preposterous possibilities. Some of these are not preposterous at all even though they go against the received assumptions of the culture in which the blog is written.
Others are genuinely preposterous, and not even I take them seriously.
I know, for example, that the circumstances of culture produce some quite different configurations of personality types than we are used to in American presuppositions. But I also wonder if the complex formations of personality don’t in fact appear cross-culturally, only in different guises and different proportions.
Hence my fantasy about generations of the Amazonian forests’ equivalent of chemistry-set tinkerers, chewing and smoking and proving the global truth that the last words of a good ol’ boy are “Hey, y’all, watch this.”
Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria, which I’ve just now begun to read around in again after a year’s lapse, is much more than a history of what its subtitle promises, “spirit visions, metaphors, and media into the twenty-first century,” which is a phrase so strange that it should warn any reader of the strangess of the intellectual ride they are in for.
I cannot believe, for example, that art historians have not heretofore made more of the use of visual metaphors for the physics of the day in Baroque paintings of the saints’ ascension into heaven. Warner may be overinterpreting, in fact, because the metaphor of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” or the standard description of the Ascension in the Book of Acts, plus Elijah’s ascension to heaven in a fiery chariot, are sufficient warrant for ascension imagery without having recourse to the theory of combustible aether. And yet her effort to plug in the data of the science of the day makes sense; the phenomena described in the Holy Scriptures would not have seemed strange or impossible to one whose worldview was shaped by such notions of the physical qualities of the stuff up there and out there, as described by Athanasius Kircher and a host of others.
Warner flips our expectations throughout the book, approaching Tolkien, the Left Behind novels, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials via the unexpected consequences of the Church’s reluctant selection of the Book of Revelation for the Bible rather than the Shepherd of Hermas. (And now that she has summarized it, I want to go back to read the Shepherd, which I’d looked at years ago as the closest also-ran for the New Testament as the Book of Enoch was not just the closest also-ran but the most actively excluded book in the Old Testament canon.) The Archbishop of Canterbury’s commendation of His Dark Materials, and Warner’s insertion of it into the succession of inheritors of William Blake’s Prophetic Books, makes me want to look at the stuff for the first time. (I’ve read the summaries and commentaries in newspapers and magazines, of course.)
And Warner’s discussion of the uncanny effects produced by straight photography in the early days (ghostly figures from long exposures, eerily empty streets produced by the necessity of even longer exposures) reminds me of the color photos of ectoplasm and cloudy apparitions I myself have taken, thanks to tiny flaws in the camera lens and the effects of sunlight striking just right. That so many of them turned up in my pictures of the spiritualist camp at Cassadaga made the results even spookier, but the camera had been malfunctioning in more mundane circumstances long previously.
That leads into the probably misunderstood jokery about the Zen of small-motor maintenance I engaged in over on crowleycrow, where my point was that sufficiently complex equipment is subject to accidental moments of self-repair simply because the frustrated would-be user has stamped the floor with his foot, or otherwise jostled some small component momentarily into place. And yet the timing is occasionally as uncanny as my quite naturally explicable photos of ectoplasm.
I am reminded of Wade Davis’ explication of the difficult chemistry of zombification in Haiti, which depends on the poisons exuded by pufferfish. If the bokor or sorcerer gets hold of a bad batch, nothing at all will happen; if the dose is slightly too strong, the subject will die. Only within an impossibly narrow range is the illusion of apparent death produced, followed by the seeming resurrection of the physical organism (which can be kept in a condition of semi-stupor through a whole other pharmacological repertoire),.
How does the bokor pull off the difficult balancing act of administering the right dosage without benefit of precise measurement>? He doesn’t. The failures can be explained away, and only the successes count,
I would point out, incidentally, that this explanation is itself used to discredit a whole host of preternatural phenomena…that we only notice the occasional accidental successes, not the vast quantity of failures My only point in this case is that though the bokor’s use of chemistry is deliberate and no such pharmacology is involved in the other phenomena, it does not mean that there is no similarly overlooked mechanism in operation, with variables we haven’t even begun to imagine. It only means that the burden of proof is on those who would insist that there is something real happening there, once in a while, that is not explained by the self-evidently impossible hypothesis offered by the practitioner but is not necessarily simply a case of imagining things, either.
Nobody believed zombification was anything but a myth until the return of a gentleman whose death had been documented by generally accepted American standards. Then there was something to explain by those who did not buy into the entire Haitian mental universe.
The advantage of being forever forever tongue-in-cheek, without inserting the smiley “joke” emoticon, is that it allows for the presentation of preposterous possibilities. Some of these are not preposterous at all even though they go against the received assumptions of the culture in which the blog is written.
Others are genuinely preposterous, and not even I take them seriously.
I know, for example, that the circumstances of culture produce some quite different configurations of personality types than we are used to in American presuppositions. But I also wonder if the complex formations of personality don’t in fact appear cross-culturally, only in different guises and different proportions.
Hence my fantasy about generations of the Amazonian forests’ equivalent of chemistry-set tinkerers, chewing and smoking and proving the global truth that the last words of a good ol’ boy are “Hey, y’all, watch this.”
Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria, which I’ve just now begun to read around in again after a year’s lapse, is much more than a history of what its subtitle promises, “spirit visions, metaphors, and media into the twenty-first century,” which is a phrase so strange that it should warn any reader of the strangess of the intellectual ride they are in for.
I cannot believe, for example, that art historians have not heretofore made more of the use of visual metaphors for the physics of the day in Baroque paintings of the saints’ ascension into heaven. Warner may be overinterpreting, in fact, because the metaphor of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” or the standard description of the Ascension in the Book of Acts, plus Elijah’s ascension to heaven in a fiery chariot, are sufficient warrant for ascension imagery without having recourse to the theory of combustible aether. And yet her effort to plug in the data of the science of the day makes sense; the phenomena described in the Holy Scriptures would not have seemed strange or impossible to one whose worldview was shaped by such notions of the physical qualities of the stuff up there and out there, as described by Athanasius Kircher and a host of others.
Warner flips our expectations throughout the book, approaching Tolkien, the Left Behind novels, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials via the unexpected consequences of the Church’s reluctant selection of the Book of Revelation for the Bible rather than the Shepherd of Hermas. (And now that she has summarized it, I want to go back to read the Shepherd, which I’d looked at years ago as the closest also-ran for the New Testament as the Book of Enoch was not just the closest also-ran but the most actively excluded book in the Old Testament canon.) The Archbishop of Canterbury’s commendation of His Dark Materials, and Warner’s insertion of it into the succession of inheritors of William Blake’s Prophetic Books, makes me want to look at the stuff for the first time. (I’ve read the summaries and commentaries in newspapers and magazines, of course.)
And Warner’s discussion of the uncanny effects produced by straight photography in the early days (ghostly figures from long exposures, eerily empty streets produced by the necessity of even longer exposures) reminds me of the color photos of ectoplasm and cloudy apparitions I myself have taken, thanks to tiny flaws in the camera lens and the effects of sunlight striking just right. That so many of them turned up in my pictures of the spiritualist camp at Cassadaga made the results even spookier, but the camera had been malfunctioning in more mundane circumstances long previously.
That leads into the probably misunderstood jokery about the Zen of small-motor maintenance I engaged in over on crowleycrow, where my point was that sufficiently complex equipment is subject to accidental moments of self-repair simply because the frustrated would-be user has stamped the floor with his foot, or otherwise jostled some small component momentarily into place. And yet the timing is occasionally as uncanny as my quite naturally explicable photos of ectoplasm.
I am reminded of Wade Davis’ explication of the difficult chemistry of zombification in Haiti, which depends on the poisons exuded by pufferfish. If the bokor or sorcerer gets hold of a bad batch, nothing at all will happen; if the dose is slightly too strong, the subject will die. Only within an impossibly narrow range is the illusion of apparent death produced, followed by the seeming resurrection of the physical organism (which can be kept in a condition of semi-stupor through a whole other pharmacological repertoire),.
How does the bokor pull off the difficult balancing act of administering the right dosage without benefit of precise measurement>? He doesn’t. The failures can be explained away, and only the successes count,
I would point out, incidentally, that this explanation is itself used to discredit a whole host of preternatural phenomena…that we only notice the occasional accidental successes, not the vast quantity of failures My only point in this case is that though the bokor’s use of chemistry is deliberate and no such pharmacology is involved in the other phenomena, it does not mean that there is no similarly overlooked mechanism in operation, with variables we haven’t even begun to imagine. It only means that the burden of proof is on those who would insist that there is something real happening there, once in a while, that is not explained by the self-evidently impossible hypothesis offered by the practitioner but is not necessarily simply a case of imagining things, either.
Nobody believed zombification was anything but a myth until the return of a gentleman whose death had been documented by generally accepted American standards. Then there was something to explain by those who did not buy into the entire Haitian mental universe.
