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Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Jerry Cullum
The late professor of Asian religions John Fenton was extraordinarily fond of a found New Yorker cartoon that he taped to his office door: a business-suited type at a bar, berating a second business-suited gentleman with “The trouble with you, Fenton, is you don’t understand the goddamned Oriental mind.”
I have written often that my sense is that we don’t understand anybody’s minds, our own least of all. I have been fascinated recently by a fact that I haven’t encountered before, in all the writings about shamanism: field work cited by Michael Taussig from the Pacific Northwest, where it was general knowledge that the magic tricks practiced by shamans were in fact tricks; not only did shamans confess their best tricks to one another in hopes of having a trick explained to them that they didn’t yet know how to do, but everyone knew that this is how it worked. But there were rigorous expectations that the tricks be done well; if the trick was done badly, then the healing wouldn’t happen.
This sounds too impossibly postmodern to be true, but I have also written repeatedly that “postmodern” is just what happens whenever there are zones of cultural collision and tension, and there have always been zones of cultural collision and tension, ever since the Paleolithic.
And as I’ve written before, the geographic zone stretching from eastern Iran to Afghanistan has historically been a particularly nasty neighborhood in terms of contending cultures in which disputes tend to get worked out unpleasantly. (There are other intermountain zones where the same dynamic obtains among different ethnic groups, but I make no hypothesis.)
So it continues to make perfect sense to me that there should have been places of refuge, monasteries that were effectively interdisciplinary institutes for anyone who was hot and bothered by the mysteries of human existence and/or the immediate problem of figuring out how to make folks get along better with one another. There would have been a huge incentive, and only occasionally would there have been central governments up to the task of sponsoring universities. (Of which latter, the ones in the adjacent richer neighborhoods were legendary, and pulled off some major intellectual discoveries.)
But it would also make sense that many of the hypotheses developed under such complex conditions would have been wrong, and the ones that were right would have been couched in self-protective phraseology. Using the wrong words to hot-headed people can get you killed, to this very day. So you do a lot of dodging and weaving, and you encode your insights in jokes.
So just as history has to be brushed against the grain (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase) to reveal the patterns of material benefit (and the barbarism of exploitation that underpins civilization), truly strange tales and texts have to be read against the grain to reveal not just the motives and the material underpinnings of their composition, but to reveal the actual content in order to evaluate it.
The trouble being that since the mind is mostly unconscious (as we now know in a purely material sense) and stretches from the swamps to the dizzying mountain heights, most of the would-be explanations of the data really do make no sense, and perhaps all of them are wrong.
And it is all too likely that legends of lost colloquies of intellectuals are true; all it takes is a few plagues and a couple of military invasions, and a lot of masters of wisdom can get wiped out, especially given their frequent lack of street smarts. (Hence the practical incentive to invent social psychology and the sociology of knowledge a few thousand years early. You need the community-liaison guys to keep the pure theoreticians from getting themselves killed, and the Companions of Complementary Disciplines do seem to have worked synergistically on occasion. Right time, right place, right people. The Lodge of the Nine Sisters may have had improbable precursors…said Lodge having once been described as “the UNESCO of the eighteenth century,” which some would not take as a Good Thing, though the historian meant it as a compliment.)
Whoever may or may not have been able to put the pieces together once in a while in past centuries, there don’t seem to be any comparable types on the scene in those latitudes in the postmodern moment. Too bad.
I title this essay as I do because thanks to an accidental convergence of homages to Pete Seeger on “Thistle & Shamrock” and on “Fresh Air,” I have heard “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” twice in less than a week, after not having heard the song for decades.
Jerry Cullum
The late professor of Asian religions John Fenton was extraordinarily fond of a found New Yorker cartoon that he taped to his office door: a business-suited type at a bar, berating a second business-suited gentleman with “The trouble with you, Fenton, is you don’t understand the goddamned Oriental mind.”
I have written often that my sense is that we don’t understand anybody’s minds, our own least of all. I have been fascinated recently by a fact that I haven’t encountered before, in all the writings about shamanism: field work cited by Michael Taussig from the Pacific Northwest, where it was general knowledge that the magic tricks practiced by shamans were in fact tricks; not only did shamans confess their best tricks to one another in hopes of having a trick explained to them that they didn’t yet know how to do, but everyone knew that this is how it worked. But there were rigorous expectations that the tricks be done well; if the trick was done badly, then the healing wouldn’t happen.
This sounds too impossibly postmodern to be true, but I have also written repeatedly that “postmodern” is just what happens whenever there are zones of cultural collision and tension, and there have always been zones of cultural collision and tension, ever since the Paleolithic.
And as I’ve written before, the geographic zone stretching from eastern Iran to Afghanistan has historically been a particularly nasty neighborhood in terms of contending cultures in which disputes tend to get worked out unpleasantly. (There are other intermountain zones where the same dynamic obtains among different ethnic groups, but I make no hypothesis.)
So it continues to make perfect sense to me that there should have been places of refuge, monasteries that were effectively interdisciplinary institutes for anyone who was hot and bothered by the mysteries of human existence and/or the immediate problem of figuring out how to make folks get along better with one another. There would have been a huge incentive, and only occasionally would there have been central governments up to the task of sponsoring universities. (Of which latter, the ones in the adjacent richer neighborhoods were legendary, and pulled off some major intellectual discoveries.)
But it would also make sense that many of the hypotheses developed under such complex conditions would have been wrong, and the ones that were right would have been couched in self-protective phraseology. Using the wrong words to hot-headed people can get you killed, to this very day. So you do a lot of dodging and weaving, and you encode your insights in jokes.
So just as history has to be brushed against the grain (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase) to reveal the patterns of material benefit (and the barbarism of exploitation that underpins civilization), truly strange tales and texts have to be read against the grain to reveal not just the motives and the material underpinnings of their composition, but to reveal the actual content in order to evaluate it.
The trouble being that since the mind is mostly unconscious (as we now know in a purely material sense) and stretches from the swamps to the dizzying mountain heights, most of the would-be explanations of the data really do make no sense, and perhaps all of them are wrong.
And it is all too likely that legends of lost colloquies of intellectuals are true; all it takes is a few plagues and a couple of military invasions, and a lot of masters of wisdom can get wiped out, especially given their frequent lack of street smarts. (Hence the practical incentive to invent social psychology and the sociology of knowledge a few thousand years early. You need the community-liaison guys to keep the pure theoreticians from getting themselves killed, and the Companions of Complementary Disciplines do seem to have worked synergistically on occasion. Right time, right place, right people. The Lodge of the Nine Sisters may have had improbable precursors…said Lodge having once been described as “the UNESCO of the eighteenth century,” which some would not take as a Good Thing, though the historian meant it as a compliment.)
Whoever may or may not have been able to put the pieces together once in a while in past centuries, there don’t seem to be any comparable types on the scene in those latitudes in the postmodern moment. Too bad.
I title this essay as I do because thanks to an accidental convergence of homages to Pete Seeger on “Thistle & Shamrock” and on “Fresh Air,” I have heard “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” twice in less than a week, after not having heard the song for decades.
