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there is a point to this post, at the end
Jan. 16th, 2012 10:07 amMy few longtime readers know that although I earn my typically meager living by writing about art (and used to write extensively about literature), art and literature are not really my primary interests. I am primarily interested in what human societies are, what kind of physical environment makes them possible (and why that physical environment exists), why the human beings in those societies do what they do, how that behavior relates to and modifies the physical world that both supports those societies and goes its own independent way indifferent to them, and what the structures of imagination are that allow human beings both to make up stories about all of this but not merely to represent all of this to themselves but to discover the underlying causes and structures of all of this (i.e., how technological and economic and artistic creation and scientific and philosophical exploration all arise from the complex and multiple nature of what we used to call “human imagination”).
Within these modest boundaries, I have more than a few obsessions for which I am regularly ridiculed, among which are the specific things that happen within diversely multiethnic societies and along borders in which dramatically colliding cultures must be dealt with by individuals and social groups; what kinds of art, literature develop under these circumstances, not to mention daily practices for getting around without being killed before the day is done?
A variety of subtopics follow, some of which repeat frequently, such as how even small societies can contain sufficient cultural contradictions to produce Nobel laureates in literature: Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia, for example. (We could go down the list of laureates in literature and single out the ones who interest me because their work happens to stem from being born into border cultures or societies freighted with fatal ethnic or cultural fissures; and longtime readers know that I have already written about such topics in the joculum journal and in ten-or-twenty-year-old issues of Art Papers—but not in any that are more recent than, say, 2005.)
A subtopic that sometimes seems like my only topic pursues the implications of these social and psychological strains into the farther reaches of human consciousness, where all of our imaginative capacities for self-deception and for jumping to wrong conclusions make the terrain particularly miry and difficult to map. (Our difficulty in avoiding mixed or inappropriate metaphors, or mis-taking metaphors for physical realities, also leads us astray here. Hence we need not only to widen the area of consciousness, but to sharpen its tools—though not so much as to cut ourselves fatally on the fossilized metaphors we have been turning into implements of dissection and destruction. This is why it is useful to have set out long ago from the world of literature en route to these successive destinations.)
I say all this again because I keep listing the URLs of my joculum and counterforces web journals in places where they are likely to attract the attention of readers who know me as an art critic. I would prefer that they not be puzzled as to what is going on, or at least as to why it is going on.
This particular post, however, arose from my wish to recommend the particular virtues of a Yale University Press book from 2008 (which I recently acquired as a remaindered hardcover) with the not very helpful title The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. It does indeed offers insight into how what eventually became a mainstream Castilian way of making and imagining culture was extracted from the previous centuries of tension in al-Andalus, but what makes it worthwhile from my perspective is that it offers so many actual examples of the lovely architecture, canny mystical texts, and elegant erotic literature that arose in those several contending Muslim and Christian kingdoms; these were places in which many of the most important and interesting literary and religious creators arose not in the moments of generous tolerance, but in the decades in which singlemindedly reformist rulers were kicking ass and writing down names.
Within these modest boundaries, I have more than a few obsessions for which I am regularly ridiculed, among which are the specific things that happen within diversely multiethnic societies and along borders in which dramatically colliding cultures must be dealt with by individuals and social groups; what kinds of art, literature develop under these circumstances, not to mention daily practices for getting around without being killed before the day is done?
A variety of subtopics follow, some of which repeat frequently, such as how even small societies can contain sufficient cultural contradictions to produce Nobel laureates in literature: Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia, for example. (We could go down the list of laureates in literature and single out the ones who interest me because their work happens to stem from being born into border cultures or societies freighted with fatal ethnic or cultural fissures; and longtime readers know that I have already written about such topics in the joculum journal and in ten-or-twenty-year-old issues of Art Papers—but not in any that are more recent than, say, 2005.)
A subtopic that sometimes seems like my only topic pursues the implications of these social and psychological strains into the farther reaches of human consciousness, where all of our imaginative capacities for self-deception and for jumping to wrong conclusions make the terrain particularly miry and difficult to map. (Our difficulty in avoiding mixed or inappropriate metaphors, or mis-taking metaphors for physical realities, also leads us astray here. Hence we need not only to widen the area of consciousness, but to sharpen its tools—though not so much as to cut ourselves fatally on the fossilized metaphors we have been turning into implements of dissection and destruction. This is why it is useful to have set out long ago from the world of literature en route to these successive destinations.)
I say all this again because I keep listing the URLs of my joculum and counterforces web journals in places where they are likely to attract the attention of readers who know me as an art critic. I would prefer that they not be puzzled as to what is going on, or at least as to why it is going on.
This particular post, however, arose from my wish to recommend the particular virtues of a Yale University Press book from 2008 (which I recently acquired as a remaindered hardcover) with the not very helpful title The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. It does indeed offers insight into how what eventually became a mainstream Castilian way of making and imagining culture was extracted from the previous centuries of tension in al-Andalus, but what makes it worthwhile from my perspective is that it offers so many actual examples of the lovely architecture, canny mystical texts, and elegant erotic literature that arose in those several contending Muslim and Christian kingdoms; these were places in which many of the most important and interesting literary and religious creators arose not in the moments of generous tolerance, but in the decades in which singlemindedly reformist rulers were kicking ass and writing down names.
