on pointlessness: an excursus

Realizing the vast number of horrific and/or catastrophic events taking place in the world that demand commentary, I feel irresponsible writing about anything else. (I was going to obliquely recognize one of them by wondering once again what ever happened to Michael Aviad, Thomas O'Dea's son of whom I had heard nothing since encountering him when he was a few-weeks-old infant who burst into wails in the midst of a dinner O'Dea was hosting for Kenneth Rexroth. Longtime readers will recall that O'Dea told the gathering, "I must apologize for my son. Consciousness is quite a burden to bear, and he hasn't had time to get used to it yet." Then, noticing my expression, O'Dea added, "Well, it is." Aviad told newspaper reporters about his curious Roman Catholic/Jewish academic upbringing while he was commanding an Israeli tank brigade in the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem...Aviad remarked that while he was an atheist himself, he knew his late father would have expressed horror at the notion of potentially injuring a shrine sacred to any religion whatsoever.)

Well, anyway, I didn't do that. But fictive things wink as they will, as Wallace Stevens wrote, and despite wincing I find myself impelled to post the stuff I wrote this morning. Which follows above.

To avoid four posts in one day I will here add my postscript to the next two posts by saying that I still wonder if Attar's combination of bad jokes, edifying anecdotes and paragraphs that advance the narrative was a simple literary convention or a device devised to be as off-putting then as it is today. I suspect the former, given what I remember of the literary conventions of neighboring cultures. But the Conference of the Birds doesn't much resemble the relatively undigressive narrative thrust of the fictions of antiquity, when compared to the anthology approach of more than one author in the time frame of which I am thinking.

you've got mail...no, actually, you've got a cognitive package

I have long had an interest in how cognitive packages get delivered.

Also how physical packages get delivered, or presented, anyway; a long-ago exhibition of the exquisitely crafted boxes used for delivering ceremonial gifts in traditional Japan left me with a fresh appreciation for the role of etiquette as secular ritual, so that how the gift is presented or the artwork staged takes on a surplus energy that other societies pour into religious activities as well as their secular parallels…all this is commonplace stuff, but I always wonder why there are not more anthropological studies of, say, the taken-for-granted worldviews of those who consume the wares of the late Oscar de la Renta versus those who not only can only afford Wal-Mart, but like its stuff better than the high-end knockoffs that Target markets, giving us the style but not the designer label.

Probably the question is too inconsequential to be investigated, which is why it always interests me. I drop in on schlock fiction of various descriptions for similar reasons, if the subject matter interests me even if the manner of presentation does not: I want to know why people choose methods and objects that are not only less complex but less emotionally comforting than some of the available alternatives. (A large part of officially received culture, whether classical or contemporary, is actually neither complex nor comforting, and would be worth revisiting beginning with Derek Walcott’s famous closing line “The classics can console. But not enough.” But that would take us off into critiques of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, one of the beasts I find more noir-ish than most such books we love to hate.)

Anyway, I have several parallel tracks that would take a few two thousand word essays to do properly, so be forewarned. I am going to post this general note on both Counterforces and joculum, because the topic pertains to art and aesthetics as well as to anthropology and religious practice. One of the advantages of being congenitally unable to negotiate the ways of the world is that everything seems equally strange, and amenable to scholarly investigation.

So now we will begin a several-part investigation of cognitive packages, and marginal practices of all sorts, including the investigation of same. We (no, actually, I) shall begin with re-reading a classic text and go to a couple of pieces of previously mentioned scholarship and a curious new piece of popular fiction.

watch the bir---no, a little bird tol---heck, are there no contemporary bird cliches?

2300 words deserve an LJ-cut: ( * )