Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality 022655693X, 9780226556932

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Part I: Outside......Page 10
Outside......Page 12
The Weight of Reality......Page 16
Doubles......Page 26
Shadows......Page 32
Part II: Chance......Page 36
Cause, Choice, Chance......Page 38
Part III: Passions......Page 52
The Altiplano......Page 54
Return of the First Person Singular......Page 62
Aconcagua......Page 72
Seduction......Page 84
Truthfulness......Page 90
Part IV: Belief......Page 92
The Stone Axe......Page 94
Angels with Guns......Page 98
Belief......Page 106
Performance......Page 118
Voyage......Page 126
Part V: Justice......Page 130
The Future of Torture......Page 132
Justice......Page 140
The System......Page 146
Truth in Reconciliation......Page 148
Part VI: Irrevocable......Page 162
The Babies in Trees......Page 164
Mortality......Page 170
Dignity......Page 180
Irrevocable Loss......Page 184
Part VII: Gratitude......Page 198
Gratitude......Page 200
Appendix: Philosophy's Tasks......Page 204
Notes......Page 224
About the Photographs......Page 236
Acknowledgments......Page 239

Citation preview

Irrevocable

Irrevocable A Philosophy of Mortality

ALPHONSO LINGIS

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55676-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55693-2 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55709-0 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226557090.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lingis, Alphonso, 1933– author. Title: Irrevocable : a philosophy of mortality / Alphonso Lingis. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004724 | ISBN 9780226556765 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226556932 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226557090 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Existential phenomenology. | Philosophy, Modern. Classification: LCC B818.5 .L56 2018 | DDC 128—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004724 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

PA R T I : O U T S I D E

Outside / 3 The Weight of Reality / 7 Doubles / 17 Shadows / 23 PA R T I I : C H A N C E

Cause, Choice, Chance / 29 PA R T I I I : PA S S I O N S

The Altiplano / 45 Return of the First Person Singular / 53 Aconcagua / 63 Seduction / 75 Truthfulness / 81 PA R T I V : B E L I E F

The Stone Axe / 85 Angels with Guns / 89

vi / Contents

Belief / 97 Performance / 109 Voyage / 117 PA R T V : J U S T I C E

The Future of Torture / 123 Justice / 131 The System / 137 Truth in Reconciliation / 139 PA R T V I : I R R E V O C A B L E

The Babies in Trees / 155 Mortality / 161 Dignity / 171 Irrevocable Loss / 175 PA R T V I I : G R AT I T U D E

Gratitude / 191 Appendix: Philosophy’s Tasks / 195 Notes / 215 About the Photographs / 227 Acknowledgments / 230

PA R T I

Outside

How could you count the warbles in the grey, colours in the fires, thuds in the bush, keep record of the morse of cicadas, seeds, sap, stems? — Tim Winton, An Open Swimmer

Outside

When we love a woman or a man, our eyes catch on the smile hovering on his lips, the smear of light on her cheeks, the darting of his eyes, the haze smoldering in her hair. These surface effects. Our gaze trails his fingers stroking the leather sofa, sways in the web of her gestures. These surface patterns that take form and disappear. When we embrace a woman or a man, we stroke the truss of the shoulders, feel soft gusts of breath on our throat, tingle the ghost fur of the arms, trawl the pleasure shivering across her or his skin. We recoil from thinking of the contents of the body we are holding up against our own— the spongy gray lungs, the stomach pouch, the intestines, spleen, liver, the biles. Contained and also protected by our skin, the inner contents of our bodies are concealed from others and also from us. They keep what they are doing secret. We do feel, vaguely, something of what is going on in there, in a mix of attachment and aversion. We are attached to the beating of our heart and to the crisp air swelling our lungs. We feel distaste in a brief thought of our kidneys, our liver, our pancreas, the slabs of yellow fat, the grisly kinks of our intestines that are pushing along chunks of mush turning brown with dead bacteria. We feel repugnance over substances expelled from our bodies— gases, excrement, vomit, mucus, pus. What we call filth, what provokes disgust outside are things we come upon that resemble what comes out of our bodies or what is inside them. Box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri, common in the South Pacific, produce and store in their bodies the most deadly venom in the animal kingdom. Contact with only three centimeters of a tentacle can be fatal for an adult human, and people have died three minutes after being stung— faster than from the sting of any snake, spider, or insect. A box jellyfish consists of a four-sided body called a bell from which hang four clusters of fifteen ten-

4 / Part I: Outside

tacles, each of which has about five thousand stinging cells. This venomous overkill is used to kill fish and shrimp instantly, such that their struggle does not damage the jellyfish’s delicate ten-foot-long tentacles. A box jellyfish has four clusters of six eyes each, four of which, the pit eyes and slit eyes, detect light and shadows, but the other two have a lens and cornea, an iris that can contract in bright light, and a retina. One of these is turned upward and can see objects out of the water. Box jellyfish are able to see tiny objects and their own transparent bodies. By pumping water in and out of their bells, they can move up to two yards a second. Box jellyfish are pale blue in color, which makes them pretty much invisible in the water. So much so that for years nobody knew what was causing swimmers such piercing pain, shock, and heart failure. Since 1954 box jellyfish have been determined to have been the cause of 5,568 human deaths.1 A group of jellyfish is called a “smack.” Spots and zigzags of gaudy colors cover the sides of coral fish; gold plumes stream over the backs of birds of paradise; lacey crests tipped with white circles spread over the heads of Victoria crowned pigeons; stripes, different on each one, cover the bodies of zebras; manes fluff about the heads of golden lion tamarins. These surface colors and patterns have no relationship with the functional parts of their bodies; they do not outline lungs, stomach, or muscle systems. They are snares for the eyes. They are organs to be seen, Adolf Portman explained.2 Or they are screens set up against eyes, such as the camouflage colors of ground-nesting female pheasants. The mottled browns of the plumage of the Malay great argus pheasant hides him in the forest, but in courtship he opens the three-foot-long decorative feathers of his wings into a complete circle in front of him and performs complex dance steps before a female. Watching him perform, we murmur: he knows how he looks to her; he knows he is gorgeous. We know that we are frowning, expressing skepticism, looking surprised or sarcastic. We know that our expression looks quizzical, shocked, or ironic. But we have no view or feeling of the muscle contractions and dilations, nervous circuitry, and pulses of blood behind our skin that engineer those surface expressions. Our expressiveness, our convictions, attitudes, character, our personality are on our skins. Remove the skin and you remove the expression, the attitude, the personality. At the “Body Worlds” exhibition by Gunther von Hagens cadavers are on display that were preserved not by replacing the blood with formaldehyde but by replacing the blood, body fluids, water, and fat with liquid plastic. There we see that those whose faces are skinned are now anonymous. We cannot imagine what these individuals were like. We move, we act by not seeing how we move. We dance when we stop

Outside / 5

watching where we are putting the right foot, then the left foot; we type not looking at where we are pressing with our fingers. When we move, we look outside. We scan the environment for open spaces and for pathways toward objectives in the distance, catching sight of moving obstacles. We can see the environment about us because we do not see anything behind our skin. By looking at the surfaces of the body of another human, we envision what he is looking at, where she is going, what he is going to pick up and manipulate. We accompany his or her life. In embracing a woman or a man we sense the commonality of life in us. The life in us likewise understands the life in other species. We look for what the vultures are circling over, we follow the inquisitive dog, we feel the misery of the caged puma. There is an inner desolation in a human life that speaks to only human voices and grasps only human hands, caresses only human bodies.3 Evolved in Earth’s ecosystems, our life is destined to know life, to answer the voices of lambs and wolves, meet the gaze of owls and octopuses, fondle the faces of cats and zebras, skip and soar with robins and albatross, hum and chant with bumblebees and locusts, creep and shimmer with caterpillars and silverfish. In the ocean we scull our fins and swim with the fish. The one word we use— life— to characterize all of them indicates that our bodies deeply feel kinship with the bodies of other animate species. But when we come upon jellyfish, we find ourselves at the limit of what the life in us can understand. We cannot imagine what it would be like to try to climb a ladder, to pick up things, to sit down if our bodies, like those of box jellyfish, were transparent. If we could not help seeing our glands secreting biles, our intestines processing our last meal, our nervous circuitry throbbing and producing dilations and contractions in bundles of muscle fibers, we could not imagine how we could move and act among the things spread out about us.

The Weight of Reality

Having arrived on a night flight, I slept late and did not get to Giza until almost noon. Tourists were climbing into air-conditioned buses to be taken to air-conditioned restaurants for the next couple of hours. The local guides were gathering in the shade of the pyramids to siesta. I headed for the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Looming massive in the cloudless white sky, thousands, millions of huge stone blocks. All the pictures had not conveyed, indeed had excluded, the sense of mass and weight that now stopped me. Several guides saw me and came after me; I gave them thirty pounds each— some five US dollars— to not guide me. I crawled up the tunnel to the tomb room. There was a fluorescent bulb on either side spreading a cold light across walls and ceiling. In the middle the now empty sarcophagus of the pharaoh. I paced the room and found it is some thirty-five feet long, seventeen feet wide; the ceiling was about twenty feet high, consisting of nine flat stone slabs. I intoned a mantra that the stone walls resounded. There was nothing for the eyes to scrutinize; they drifted in the stillness. The sense of the enormous weight of stone above this room pressed down on me. Moving from one side to the other, I felt it everywhere in the tomb room. I forced myself to think of the five thousand years that this hollow had endured, think that the nine stone slabs of the ceiling had held back the weight of the thousands of stones above them. But the weight of the stones continued to fill my mind and crushed any movements of thought about what this tomb room was, who this pharaoh was, how the pyramid was built. I was in a space without past or future, in a present that did not pass, a dead time. I lay on the floor next to the empty sarcophagus of the pharaoh. I heard a sound in the tunnel; someone was coming. I got up and left the room. On the way down I crossed a bearded foreigner on the way, a lone backpacker. Outside I thought to look at my watch: I had been inside two

8 / Part I: Outside

hours. The guides were still dozing in the shadow of the pyramid. My eyes were dazzled by the sun and saw only the shadows and the sands rolling in dunes unto the horizon. Shadows cast by the pyramids but that did not weigh upon the ground, sands made of stone but drifting in the weak but steady wind. Astronauts in a state of weightlessness observe the stars in outer space and planet Earth rotating in the void. When we read about the universe as physics and chemistry, electromagnetism, and astronomy represent it, it gives us a strange sense of weightlessness; it is a representation where all things, and our bodies, are clouds of infinitesimal energy units in frantic motion. Things in our environment that we pick up, throw, or shove have weight. This weight is not the same as the force of a mass pressing upon another mass that science measures and conceptualizes as gravity. The weight of a crystal bowl is not simply pressure on the elasticity of our muscles and limbs; it is felt in our sensibility. The feeling is a qualitative sensation not localized in the muscles and tendons actually being stretched. The whole body feels the weight of things; a gallon of cider is felt to have the same weight when lifted with one hand or with both, with a foot, and when laid on one’s back. A rock is felt to have the same weight when lifted under water in a pond and when held in the air. The weight is felt to be not in the body that feels it but in the crystal bowl, the armchair. Weight is felt in the sensibility and even in the mind. The weight of a backpack encumbers our mind that is working out a plan for the rest of the day or rehearsing what we will say to our lover with whom we have had a serious quarrel. The weight of a book or an armchair lifted is not measured in units, pounds, or kilograms; “too heavy” is beyond what the body can hold; “very light” is a weight that the body barely registers. Yet what is beyond what the body can hold is perceived as having weight, roughly gauged and compared— the weight of the rocks in the Ryo¯an-ji Garden in Kyoto, of the pillars of Stonehenge, of a fallen sequoia. In looking at things we see successive surfaces of things; in touching things we feel only stretches of them across moments of time. But the weight of a chainsaw, of a bag full of books is everywhere, unsegmented, in them. The sense of weight is a sense of the whole thing, which holds itself together and separate, disconnected from other things. Unarticulated, without internal structure, cohesive without coherence, the weight of things is not grasped and appropriated in concepts, is opaque and alien. The hands that

The Weight of Reality / 9

hold the weight of a statue or a big dictionary are sense organs that do not apprehend the sense— meaning and direction— of things; they are receptive of, affected by the opacity of the substance of things. They are sense organs that are not considering but pondering. We deal with the weight of things. Hands drop and toss, arms heave and hurl. They make things projectiles and are projectiles. Things weigh in their settings. A truck abandoned in the weeds sinks into the ground. We have to go down steps to enter the Santísima Church in Mexico City; it has sunk more than nine feet since it was built. During the last Ice Age, beginning a hundred and ten thousand years ago, Scandinavia was covered with ice up to three kilometers deep; its weight pushed the land mass down into Earth’s fluid mantle. Since the end of the glacial period ten thousand years ago, the Scandinavian land mass has risen 275 meters— 900 feet. The postglacial isostatic rebound, geologists call it. The weight of things, the import of things. We have a primary sense of importance; in everything we do, to perceive is to perceive the important and the accessory or irrelevant. We distinguish between what is important for us and also what is important for an industry, an institution, a culture, or an ecosystem and what is simply important, that whose importance is perceived in it, whose importance is intrinsic. Importance of the Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon at Teotihuacán, whose forms repeat that of the mountains all about them, linking the continental plate and the luminaries of outer space. Importance of the great ruby-red rock Uluru that commands the vast deserts of central Australia as the heart of the continent. Importance of a wilderness, of a herd of elk. Nonsignifying, density in itself, there is importance in weight, weight is in importance. Reality extends from the weighty unto the weightless. Trompe l’oeil domes, walls, and pillars of baroque churches, mosaics, gilding, paint— they hide or deny the substance of things and have little weight themselves. A house where the walls are covered with paisley wallpaper, the floors and furniture veneered, the flowers artificial and the dishware plastic appears insubstantial and the inhabitants insubstantial. Leaves fluttering in the air, feathers, dandelion fluff— we see forms designed in the emptiness, weight diminished to almost imperceptible in them. Things whose weight appears only as an evanescent allusion— spray, vapors, mists, haze. Reflections, halos, shadows, glows, glimmers, sparkles exist in the free spaces of the world of weighty things. They delineate the contours of things for us and lead us down paths and to horizons. Reflections, shadows, halos,

10 / Part I: Outside

will-o’-the-wisps captivate the eyes and keep us absorbed in the environment beyond the paths, implements and obstacles, and objectives to which our needs and practical interests attach us. They are glories and menaces that emanate off things. “Ultra-things” Henri Wallon called beings we cannot reach, whose weight we cannot gauge: the moon that follows us wherever we go on the paths of the world, the clouds, the sun, the stars.1 The aurora borealis, neither hovering over Earth as the clouds do nor in the outer spaces of the stars, rippling in some fourth dimension. The Milky Way seen in the night sky, within which all the weighty things on Earth, the other planets, the sun, and the planets about other suns are assembled. Looking, Martin Heidegger says, is on the move, traveling down paths, surveying implements and obstacles, envisioning objectives, taking them as resources that serve for further objectives, without end. Viewing each thing in its practical context, perception is comprehensive, already understanding. Conceptual understanding envisions things in series and in classes, in spatiotemporal coordinates and in causal relations. Understanding not standing under things is, Heidegger says, in ecstatic movement, advancing, searching, circumnavigating, detouring, manipulating, assembling. Restlessness of spirit. There is also the understanding that comes with dwelling long with things. A villager in Bali carving wood sculptures. A hiker who camps and ponders the cliff above him as evening falls. An anthropologist participantobserver lives six months, two years in a rural village. A marine biologist over twenty years has recorded the songs of whales in the five oceans. The identifying, calculating, reasoning knowledge exists to serve our experience with things, dwelling with them, pondering them. Words are not only units of a code, designating concepts; they have pitch, attack, timbre, volume, and duration. They are ponderous, conveying the weight of things, heavy, weighing down things, or light, lightening, trivializing.

The Weight of the World For objects to take form about us, Immanuel Kant argued, we must first have an intuition of space and time— unlimited space, as conceptualized in the first science, geometry; infinite time. Martin Heidegger argued instead that the space in which we uncover and discover paths, implements, obstacles, and objectives is opened and extended with them. It is a practicable layout, a perceived clearing with depths and horizons of closure. In late writings

The Weight of Reality / 11

he says that this clearing opens as skies with sun and night, wind and rain, winter and summer over the closure of earth; opens with movements both directed by the harbingers of goodness, of the divinities, and destined to the abyss of death.2 But if our practical movements blaze paths into the clearing, we do not constitute, project, or call up the presence of the world. We find ourselves destined for the world, cast into it. In its undifferentiated expanse the world from the first affects us, weighs on us. Emotions are affected by the lures and menaces of particular things and situations, but moods, Heidegger explains, are ways we are affected by the subsistence of the world as an undifferentiated whole. Sparkling with possibilities, it energizes us and liberates us; a layout of undifferentiated equivalence, it affects us with boredom; its density and opaqueness oppress us. For Heidegger the clearing of space opens before our practical movements in a world that from the first weighs on us in moods. But the clearing in which we perceive things is not just, as Heidegger says, a spread of possibility and impossibility, and it is not empty; it is filled with light, heat or cold, humidity or aridity. They are elements, not things, Emmanuel Levinas wrote; they are without surfaces, are qualities without substances, fathomless depths. They are not perceived but given in a sensuous sensibility that finds itself immersed in them, that moves in involution into them, and that vibrates upon itself in enjoyment.3 There is also involution in gloom, which prolongs itself in resignation and finally in morose enjoyment. Although the elements are formless, they have weight. Air, heat and cold, humidity and aridity lighten or weigh down things. Light may have a light touch that illuminates the weight of things and may also lift the weight of things, such that they float in the radiance of light. Darkness lifts the demands and resistance off things. Things dissolve in the density of darkness that oppresses and immobilizes us. The ground upon which light, darkness, air, heat, cold, humidity, and aridity extend is not observed as things are observed. It is there as a surface over an unarticulated depth, a density supporting the weight of all things in their places. Its supporting weight rises in our postures and positions; we feel it and rely on it in our advances and manipulations. When in fatigue the weight of our bodies inclines us to rest and sleep, we rest on the repose of the ground. We break our intentional and practical bonds with things, we abandon diagrams of movement and posture, we give ourselves over to the support of the ground that will support the practical layout without us. We confide our restless body to the bed and the pillow.

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We give over the weight of our cares and of our body to the depth of the ground.

The Weight of Life We see the mass of our palms, stomach, thighs; we feel our tongue, cheeks, earlobes, eyes, buttocks. We feel the bulk of our bodies constricted on a narrow bed, an airplane seat, trapped in a tiny studio apartment. We stroke the firmness and give of our muscles, we feel the bones of our fingers, our elbows, knees, ribs, back. We feel the weight of our bodies in running and in high jumping and in sitting and resting. The things we lift and hold are as substantial as we are, and we feel we have weight as they do. We feel the give of the boards, the sand, or the forest leaves as we walk. We hold things down, crush them. Our initiatives leave their weight on things, on the world. As we use our body parts as sense organs, we feel their weight. To perceive the elasticity or rigidity of things, we have to push against them. To feel the contours and grain of things, we have to not weigh hard on them but press lightly across them. Clumsiness is the movements of the body encumbered by its weight. Energy and skill counter the weight of the body, switch it into drive and force. Graceful positions and movements maintain the weight of the body in balance and dynamic equilibrium. Dance movements reach for and grasp nothing, are movements that are going no where, absolute movements. Fatigue is the sense of inner resistance to our initiatives and movements. We feel our bodies lagging behind the trajectories of movement we throw forth. Movements are no longer activated by a rhythm that once launched prolongs itself; each step, each manipulation has to be initiated anew. We feel the weight of an arm lying across our belly, of legs lying one on the other. The dead weight of a swollen leg, of an arm whose nerves have been cut. Weight of the bored, depressed, catatonic body. We support our bodies on guardrails, against walls, on the bodies of friends. Immersion in water lifts the weight of the body. To sit or lie down is to let the weight of our body be received in the weight of the ground. Our bodies, whose weight smashes cardboard boxes and small ecosystems in the prairie, can be crushed by the press of crowds, by buildings shaken in earthquakes or bombed. An initiative connects with, responds to a goal still in the future. It also retains, responds to its starting point and past phases. They supply and maintain the direction and the momentum of the movement. Focusing the

The Weight of Reality / 13

impulses and energies of our body, narrowing them down, the past phases weigh on the free leap of the initiative. Our past initiatives attained or aborted are definitively inscribed in the past, weighing on the world, materialized. They also weigh on the direction and moment of an initiative we take. As we advance in time, we are weighed down by our very commencements, initiatives, freedom. We feel the increasing effort required to break and commence anew, the increasing fatigue. This sense of being encumbered with the weight of all our initiatives is the inner experience of aging. It is visible in wrinkles and scars, materialization. In aging we sense our body turning into the immobility and weight of a corpse. We are moved by the surprise, elation, hope, pride, anxieties, grief of others. Our bodies explore others, touching them lightly. Others are not only opaque in that they can conceal their thoughts and mask their intentions; they are also opaque in their weight. A handshake in greeting is not simply a gesture signifying recognition, and the handshake after a decision not simply a gesture that marks agreement and commitment. The handshake grasps the force of another’s body, supports its weight and is supported by it. The repetitive, aimless movements of caresses disconnect the instrumental intentions of the beloved’s body from their objectives and awaken sensitivity in the substance of that body, such that that body is absorbed in itself. While affecting the beloved’s body with one’s pressure, warmth, and movement, the lover is affected by them, exciting pleasure within. The lover’s hands roll the beloved’s body and lift the head. The lover’s body loses its posture and diagrams of movement; its arms and legs settle into their weight. Lovemaking, which is nonsignifying, movements without objective, vocalizations turning into nonsense, laughter, signs, and moans, nonetheless weighs on the lovers and in their world as the most serious practical initiatives do not. Before the disconsolate grief of someone, we embrace him or her, hold tight, supporting a body whose initiatives are helpless, sinking. Unable to restore a loss, we offer the support of our body to the weight of grief. When we can do nothing for and promise nothing to an injured or dying person, we lay our hand in his or her hand in a touch of consolation. The injured or dying person feels the weight of that hand but receives no message. With that touch we join the injured or dying person sinking into the weight of his body, in threatened or advancing materialization. The weight of sleeping children we carry, of bodies wounded, fainted, in a coma, dead. Bodies push against one another, push off one another, destabilize one

14 / Part I: Outside

another. Fights, violence, torture violate the space and integrity of the other and are strivings to know the other, his or her intentions, sense of self and of honor, powers. The dispute settles on the bodies of the combatants, on their fatigue and wounds, on the world. Verbal disputes and combat also leave wounds. Words shock, strike, jab, bite, pick on, harass, lacerate our bodies. Bodies set in factories, their force converted into profit. Bodies massed in workshops, in the street, in firing lines. Bodies thrown onto trucks, into mass graves. Our bodies are weighted down with raiment and adornments. Men and women are covered with furs and jewelry. In Myanmar Kayan Padaung women wind up to twenty kilos of bronze coils about their necks. Bodies of the dead and also of the living are cast in bronze and stone. In public places heroic and erotic statues holding positions, indicating directions are set up as witnesses of decisive events and guides to hold and direct our lives. Statues of bodies gesticulate, leap, and soar, overcoming weight and held in the weight of bronze and marble. Powerful forces and spirits are materialized in idols and totems. The aspiring and the ecstatic, the beautiful and the ideal are given weight.

Doubles

Willows, rocks, cascades, clouds, peregrines, dragonflies: real things. They are present, in the present. Having left them, we find them again. They are where they are, independent of us, whether we locate them or not. There are times when all our names, categories, and uses for them fade away and we are confronted with their brute reality. The urban and historical context of the Place de la Concorde fades away, and we find ourselves standing on rough stones glistening in the rain.1 Evolutionary biology contests Platonic metaphysics and philosophical idealism: our perception of our environment is not essentially different from that of other biological species. Fish, birds, and mammals survive because the things they perceive are indeed external to their minds, independent of them, and as real as they are. Things turn to us one side of themselves at a time. But as we stand before an armchair and shift position, this side of it tilts up another side and indicates sides to come. To see a real thing and not a fixed surface pattern is to see it as a cohesive and coherent whole existing in depth and across duration. We see the front plane of the refrigerator and see its solidity extending down the sides and across the back. Things are present before us with their pasts and futures. A rock retains the shape given it centuries ago by water freezing and melting; a tree trunk retains the swerve it took decades ago to distance itself from the shade of the adjacent tree. Its growth in good season and bad can be seen in the rings of its trunk. A corpse retains the expression of resignation or pain the body felt at the last movements of its life. The wall that is green was green and will be green; a spread of green that would be there only an instant would lack the substantiality of a real thing. The garden bench emerges from its past, and its substantiality shows its

18 / Part I: Outside

future. Descending the canyon, we see its shapes cut by the water and the wind that are even now wearing away the path under our feet. As we walk, we see the continually elongating, widening, and narrowing sides and stretching or shrinking patterns each thing turns to us. As the shifting of the cloud far beyond our reach can hold our rapt gaze, so our eyes, without surveying, without any practical concern, are absorbed by the changing facets of a building, by the turns and swirls of a pine as we walk up the hill. The reality of things is not confined within their contours. A rock compresses the earth below it and is supported in its place by the earth. Under the sun it radiates heat and light about itself. A bush crumbles the earth with its roots and seeps gases into the atmosphere. An abrupt discharge of electricity in the storm clouds detonates a thunderclap that shatters a goblet in the dining room. Things also engender doubles of themselves. Rocks and fences cast shadows on the ground, trees across the sidewalk; the crests of snowdrifts and sand dunes shadow the troughs. The brook sends streaks of light down the reeds and the willows. The reeds and the willows flick reflections of themselves into the water and into the translucent eyes of herons, deer, and humans. The colors of things bleed out of them to tint or tarnish the atmosphere. The shapes of things merge into one another to form waves and swells and compressions. The buildings radiate their wood or stone tones upon one another and into the light and the air, making the atmosphere of one town different from another. In twilight the colors of the forest drift off the contours of the leaves and dissolve the branches in a miasma of fermenting greens. The metal chains and jewels of matrons in the benefit dinner link up with the glitter of the glasses and gleam of the silver. The colors of a face not only outline the surfaces and pores of the carpentry of that face but also interact with one another in the brew of a sensual, swarthy, or porcelain complexion. Yasunari Kawabata contemplates the strobe dabs of sulfurous glow from fireflies on the brow and cheeks of a girl in the night.2 Aural images of things move off them. The pear rolling down the roof sends a run of rumble across the ceiling. In the bamboo thicket canes flick long thin shrieks into the wind. The water splashing over rocks in the brook sends a syncopation of sputterings over its banks. The fallen leaves send on with the breeze the whirr of their slidings and raspings. The sonorous images of things, their cracklings, thumpings, and thuds link up to form rustlings, rolls, or din. The splash of the raindrops echo in the splashes of raindrops all about, composing sizzle.

Doubles / 19

Many of these emanations are ephemeral while the things are enduring, but others endure after the things have passed on or passed away. The grass retains the imprint of the deer’s body after it has left; the shale holds the shape of the dinosaur whose body has long decomposed. Things react to these doubles; the moss flourishes in the shadow of the building, the grass lifts itself out of the imprint of the deer’s body. Things react to their doubles: bushes raise their flowers above their shadows. Things cast doubles of themselves upon the surfaces of our bodies and upon our sensory surfaces. They cast reflections of their colors and shapes upon our eyes, send their reverberations into our ears, from a distance spread their tang and sweetness into our nose and mouth. And things cast the doubles that other things cast on their surfaces upon our sensory surfaces. The pond casts the zigzags of sunlight upon our eyes; the snow relays upon us the gesticulating shadows of the leafless trees. Our bodies, like other things, cast shadows on the ground, send their reflections on the surface of the pond and the window and on photographic film, radiate their colors onto other things and into the light and the air. They cast doubles of themselves upon the sensory surfaces of other bodies. Our bodies also generate doubles of themselves that they leave in the past and project into the future. They leave imprints of their shape on the bed, on the beach, on photographic paper. They project doubles of themselves on the dance floor at the end of the drive, on the guests awaiting them at the wedding feast. Our bodies also shadow themselves, have a double perception of themselves. Our eyes see, our hands touch little of ourselves, but as we sit, walk, reach for and manipulate things, a postural schema takes form in our bodies. It holds our parts and limbs together and gives us an inner sense of where and how our arms and legs are positioned. We have an inner sense of how our legs are extended under the table and how our hands are extended groping in the dark. We also have a “body image”: as we sit or walk or reach for things, we have a quasi-visual image of how our bodies look from the outside. It is not an “image” our mind is imagining; it is a perceptual sense of how our body looks as it would be seen from a viewing distance outside. It is generated by our postural schema, like a reflection or a shadow cast by our postural schema. Martin Heidegger argued that perception is intrinsically practical; we look about in order to get somewhere and do something; we perceive things by moving among them and manipulating them.3 But that is surely wrong:

20 / Part I: Outside

when we sit on the deck or walk to the store, we see and hear leaves fluttering to the ground, tree branches zigzagging across one another, birds careening in the sky, clouds drifting, wind gusting, crickets chirping, patterns, rhythms, tonalities, reverberations, mists, glows, glimmers, sparkles that we are nowise looking at in view of doing something to them or with them. All that— lures and ensnares the eyes. When captivated by the realm of shadows, reflections, reverberations, the I is but a semblance of its active self. It no longer focuses, disengages objects and objectives, or launches initiatives. Our eyes and our bodies are moved by the rhythm of the reflections of the trees and the clouds swaying on the surface of the lake. We arrive at the concert hall, find our seat, look around for people we know or know about, look at the musicians tuning up, appraise the conductor striding to the podium. Then the music begins, and the sounds detach from the substances whose metallic or wood or catgut nature they revealed, and run free in another dimension where they link up in rhythms and melodies. Our freedom is bound, caught up in those rhythms and melodies; we follow the music like and with anyone about us. But involvement in a rhythm produces an intense sense of presence, an obsessed lucidity quite different from the obscurity and indistinctness in which habits, reflexes, or instinct operate. We feel contentment when the substance of things fills a lack or need, a hunger or thirst. We feel satisfaction when the things do not obstruct but lend themselves to our manipulations. But so much of our pleasure in the world, pleasure in being in the world, is a pleasure in the glows, gleams, and halos about things, in the reflections and shadows things cast about themselves. Our gaze skips and sways with them, attracted and delighted by them. These doubles the things generate can also be disquieting and threatening. The oversized shadow of an intruder on the window strikes panic. As twilight advances, the shadows advance over things, finally engulfing them, but we sense that in the night the sonority of the things intensifies and spreads far from them while they close in upon us, touch us without being seen. Artists take up and prolong the fascination of our eyes and ears not with the “properties” of things, the shapes and colors that are stabilized in their integrated and subsistent structures, but with the shadows, reflections, auras, and mirages the things engender. Photographers capture the mists harboring a valley, the light blazing in the hair about a face. Music captures in the resonances and movements of sound forces that move us, that we receive in emotions.

Doubles / 21

In our lives, in our actions, what we do is ordered— by the paths and the obstacles, by the tasks, by the people about us, by the hungry horses in the barn, by the rivers and the forests, by the sun and the night. There are imperatives, injunctions, directives, prohibitions in the things about us. The shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations of things also appeal to us, summon us, and order us. The sparkle of the dewy morning summons us outdoors. The shadows of the forest trees invite our footsteps and our rest. The luminous waves and runs of light in the coral sea order our pleasured submission as we move into it and under it. The tone and atmosphere of the Zen temple imposes quiet and contemplation. Kawabata writes of the sound of the mountain that guided his itineraries, his ascents, and his returns.4 The rumble of the waves in the night orders our heartbeat and respiration as we sink into sleep at night. The cries of the fledgling bird fallen from the nest appeals to us. The rumble of the avalanche prohibits our advance.

Shadows

It is dance, wayang orang, that visitors interested in Javanese and Balinese culture discover. The dancers are masked, save those who perform the roles of the gods, Rama and Sita and Lakshmi, and they with their closed eyes, immobile faces, totally composed movements that never are agitated by emotion, are the more masked still. The movements, of gyrating and undulating bodies, fluttering fingers, and gliding or high-springing steps, are continuous, the knees bent and continually swaying with no tension at the point of reversal, without any climax or pause or acceleration or deceleration, such that the dance is yoga in movement. While the dancers are earthbound, never with the grace of Western ballet that leaps off the floor and soars, the absence of any tension, direction, or climax gives a vision of weightlessness, of floating. The strange angles at which the hands are held, the legs bent, the reversals of the elbows and torso as though the dance could not move in a threedimensional space, the floating weightlessness are the very movements of the shadow puppets of the wayang kulit, the shadow play. “Puppets” is a misleading term; for us puppets are imitations of human actors; in Java the positions and movements of human dancers are derived from those of the shadow puppets. In Java and Bali, and across Cambodia, Siam, and Myanmar, wayang kulit, the shadow play, is the primordial art form, the matrix, of immemorial antiquity, from which dance, wayang orang (theater with human actors), costume, sculpture and temple architecture, painting, and music derive. The theater consists of a white sheet hung in the temple courtyard and a coconut shell with oil whose leaping and flickering flames magnify, contract, and agitate the shadows cast by the puppets held some distance from the screen. There are a hundred puppets; they are made of intricately perforated leather

24 / Part I: Outside

and worked from below by bamboo canes held in the fingers of the dhalang. He falls into a trance at sunset, and the shadow play will last until daybreak makes the shadows on the screen invisible. The gamelan is reduced to five musicians; the dhalang alone animates all the puppets and sings all the roles, in male or female, infantile or bestial pitch, in the sacred Kawi language of the gods, in the five languages in which the Balinese address the five castes of Balinese society, in the vulgar or colloquial language of farcical interludes. He is seer, sorcerer, shaman. The eyes of the people gathered before the screen are hypnotized by the flickering shadows; by the circadian rhythms of the body; by the never-ending, never-climaxing cadences of the gamelan; by the unearthly chant of the dhalang; by the long night in which their bodies will be seated in a physical fatigue from which sleep is driven by the percussion of the gamelan. The dhalang, who has spent several days absorbing the tensions, personal conflicts, good and bad fortune of the different villagers, weaves into his tale these personages and deeds, which thereby lose their individuating force and become swaying and flickering shadows. The villagers are entranced, have lost the sense of their identities, and are possessed by the shadows, transported into the shadows they are already becoming. The villagers enter into the metaphysical realm, the realm of ancestors and layaks. Layaks haunt the ravines, canyons, and jungle thickets of these volcanic islands— transformational phenomena, frogs that speak, owls that change into lizards, vines that swell into dragons, locusts that project fangs and fiery tongues, leaves that turn into claws. Every villager returning homeward from the fields at the end of the day has seen them. The layaks make their apparition in the times of transition, at dawn, at high noon, at twilight. At these times a villager stops whatever he or she is doing and puts offerings of foods and flowers at the crossing of paths in his garden, field, or workshop. “Animism” and “spiritism” are misleading terms to designate the realm of layaks; layaks are forms cast off by the forms of things, forms that extend and transform the forces of things. In the space immediately adjacent to every house is a cemetery where the ancestors of the family, who have been cremated, are daily revered and invoked on empty altars. We imagine that a society marked by “ancestor worship” is a society where the elders are the depositories of experience and wisdom, the centers of decision, and are revered and when dead are fixed in the lineaments of their wisdom and directives and thus magnified, or “deified.” And in which the youth grow into an identity of character by participation in the archetypal identity of the elder and the ancestor. But in

Shadows / 25

Bali the reverse is the case.1 When a child, say Ketut, is born, it is his father who loses his proper name and becomes known in the village no longer as Wayang, but as “Ketut’s father.” When Ketut in turn has a son, say Madé, Wayang will now be known as “Madé father’s father.” One is not known by one’s experiences and deeds but by a relationship with someone just born. Thus it is birth that gives individual identity, and as one advances in years, one ceases to be known by a proper name but by a category; one’s identity becomes abstract and impersonal. By the time one’s child has had a child, even before one dies one has already advanced far into figuring in the village as an impersonal presence. One is already a shadow extending behind one who has just come forth into the light of day. But the shadows are not a Platonic order of ideal and intelligible forms to which the course and fluctuations of reality are referred. The shadows are layaks, transformational forms more powerful than the shapes of things that in the daylight are closed and opaque surfaces that cover over and conceal the forces in things. One who has not seen the layaks has not seen the forces of things, has seen but the surfaces that hide things. The shadows are ancestors, the impersonal and abstract functions into which every new birth pushes those who advance in the years of their life. That is why it is a misinterpretation to speak of reality and its shadows. The force of birth in the light of day casts one’s parents and grandparents into the shadow, but it is by becoming impersonal and abstract that a man and a woman are able to give birth. Reality is there by casting shadows; it is the shadows that inscribe beings in reality. Western metaphysics distinguishes two orders of reality to then relate them; for the Balinese this is one system in which becoming real consists in casting shadows, and it is from the shadows that the dancer of the wayang orang, that is, every villager, contracts form and consistency. The play enacted by humans is a shadow of the play of shadows. Religion here is revelation not of an invisible and purely intelligible realm beyond reality but of the force of shadows that engenders the real, or of the shadows in which reality is real, or of the shadows of reality and the reality of shadows.

PA R T I I

Chance

The shadow is outside us, out of our control, but only to a point. It dances us in ways we cannot dance, in spaces we cannot reach. — Vincent Crapanzano, Recapitulations

Cause, Choice, Chance

It had started to rain lightly in the Deer Park in Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon. I took shelter under the huge arms of the bodhi tree, which was grown from a cutting taken from a tree grown from a cutting taken from the bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Someone else had taken shelter there, a man of around forty, dressed in white dhoti and kurta with cream-colored scarf. His presence was very beautiful, composed and gracious, his voice resonant, and he was physically beautiful too. He said he was an astrologist. I said I would like to hear about his work. He is consulted by people who are troubled, who find that they are unable to cope with their situation. He helps them get in touch with material reality and their bodies. He explains that our bodies are composed of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, silicon, iron, fluorine, zinc, rubidium, strontium, bromine, lead, copper, aluminum, cadmium, boron, barium, tin, iodine, manganese, nickel, gold, molybdenum, chromium, cesium, cobalt, uranium, beryllium, and radium. He recommends meals of varied and wholesome foods, dusted with ground precious stones, rubies and sapphires. He then prepares their chart, putting their birth and the cardinal events of their lives in the cosmic map of the most remote heavenly bodies. There are, he said, necessity, choice, and chance. There is today a rigorous discourse on determinism— the natural sciences, including anatomy, physiology, neurology. He said there is today a rational discourse on decision— ethics and politics. But in the West there is no longer a reputable discourse on chance; it only survives in the marginalized talk of gamblers and fortunetellers. Each day we attend to the causalities that determine the physical well-being of our bodies and their safety, the causalities that determine the

30 / Part II: Chance

layout of possibilities and obstacles in our environment. We make decisions about the goals we want to pursue and the responsibilities we undertake for the welfare of our children and our community. But all the major events in our lives are due to chance— our birth; a teacher who captivated us and engaged us in mathematics or nursing, music or football; the person we happened to meet and fell in love with; the job opportunity that abruptly opened; our child who was born or who was autistic or who died; the car crash that crippled us; the tumor that grew silently in our inner organs. There is, he said, an element of chance and risk in every relation with another human being. We never really know what someone might think or might do. We can only trust him or her. Chance is the unpredictable, the incalculable, the incomprehensible— surprise, shock, good or bad luck. In any experiment the formalism of quantum mechanics can predict the possible outcomes and the probability of each of those possible outcomes but cannot predict a definite outcome for a particular experiment that might have more than one outcome. Statistical mechanics calculates probabilities in large systems. In the world scrutinized down to the level of atoms, subatomic particles, and radiations, microphysicists accept the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In the universe viewed back to the Big Bang and the subsequent dispersion of clouds of gases that collected into stars and novae and galaxies, astronomers recognize that the determinisms established for observable and measurable events on this planet do not apply. Random mutations occur in species, most of which stunt the offspring or make them maladapted to their environment, some of which are beneficial and make the offspring more adaptable, and some of these eventually issue in new strains and new species. When I think of the chance encounter of this woman with this man— out of the seven billion humans on the planet— of the chance that she pleased him and he her, and of the chance that they disrobed and made love, and then of the infinitesimal chance that out of 200 million spermatozoa repeatedly ejected into her vagina this one met with and got absorbed into this ovum, I can only think that my existence was extremely improbable. Each gamete contributes twenty-three chromosomes. They could combine in more than seventy trillion different combinations. This particular combination that I am had but one chance out of seventy trillion to take place. Had any of these other combinations taken place, the child who would have been born would not have been me but someone as different from me as a brother or a sister.

Cause, Choice, Chance / 31

Then I think that in my grandmother’s womb the chance that my father was who he is and not someone different was also one in seventy trillion. Likewise my mother is a staggeringly improbable chance combination, and likewise each of my ancestors. The more, now, that I study the world, with all the books and laboratories of physicists, chemists, biologists at my disposal, determining, for each event in the world, the conjuncture of disparate causes that brought it about, the less I see that my existence was anywhere decided by the course of the natural world. Beneath me, behind me, there is nothing that programmed me, required me. Our enterprising understanding finds itself blocked by unforeseeable chance, struggles against chance. But my primal recognition of chance is to celebrate the chance of my existence. And thus there is excitement, exhilaration in the recognition of chance events and encounters. That my facial features are refined or commonplace, that my hair is brown or blond are effects of chance. I find I have beauty, vivacity, flair, style, dash not through character management but by good luck. As I have the bad luck to be ugly, dull, lumbering, low vitality, and low libido. As some people have the good fortune to have quick and penetrating minds, there are also people who have a talent for happiness. In the workplace, in everyday situations, in the rain and the snow, they are not dulled and darkened by despondency, and they laugh a lot. Whereas others, equally endowed with health, self- confidence, intelligence, physical skills always seem to be in neutral or even dull; they have to force themselves to feel happiness. By a stroke of bad luck some people have genetic and biochemical predisposition to sociopathology. As there is physical bad luck, there is also moral bad luck. And there is moral good luck, as philosopher Bernard Williams argued.1 There are people who are spontaneously generous, people who impulsively leap to help a person in distress at risk to themselves, being brave by nature. People who easily resist peer pressure to go along with shabby and venal behavior. People who do not get overwhelmed with anxiety when a moral decision involves risk to themselves. Passions are distributed to humans by chance. The passion for truth, which drives great scientists— they say they found it in themselves; it was not really put in them by education. Likewise the passion for justice— in Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Che Guevara. Passion for adventure, for love.

32 / Part II: Chance

Morality exists to counteract Fortuna, the good or bad luck that befalls individuals. It aims at an order where goods are distributed according to merit. It excludes chance, caprice, folly. By postponing the recompense of merit to another world, the rational autonomy Kant celebrated is achieved independently of the accidents of nature and of history. The compulsively thinking mind, confronting bad and good luck, seeks to find causes and reasons for strokes of luck. People find inanimate objects, charms, amulets, talismans, tattoos, found or kept on one’s person, that bring good luck and malefic objects and events that are encountered that bring bad. They find willful agents, spirits, gods, or demons. The Roman god Fortuna and the Hindu god Lakshmi were acknowledged to be distributors of luck. The Christian theological concept of Providence attributes all strokes of luck to Divine Plan. Thornton Wilder, in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, recounts that on July 20, 1714, an Inca suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. Franciscan Brother Juniper witnessed the horror and could not help asking, “Why did this happen to these five?” He spent the next six years interviewing hundreds of people in an attempt to prove, empirically, scientifically, that Providence had determined that what appeared to common mortals a blow of catastrophic bad luck was exactly the right moment for these people to die. But after six years of interviews he realized that there was much that was uncertain and much that was not disclosed in all his research. The authorities of the church recognized that and pronounced the work heretical. They ordered his book to be burned and its author with it. We know only by raising questions, and everything we discover gives rise to further questions. We pursue knowledge knowing that death will cut short our interrogation before the answers are supplied. We have no idea what significance being a jazz musician, a southern novelist, a physicist, a nuclear engineer, an American, a Westerner will have at the end of the century. We will die of AIDS without knowing if a cure will be found a year after our death; we will die of cancer without knowing if the ozone shield hole will be closed or opened ever wider by the advance of industrialization and fossil fuel usage. Our understanding, in recognizing causalities, and also in recognizing choice and its consequences, locates causes and choice in the linear time of the before and after. Chance events occur without being foreseen in our

Cause, Choice, Chance / 33

survey of the causalities of the environment. They occur in a field of time without progression, the time of fate. This time is not given in a separate intuition; it is caught sight of in an event— a birth in all its unforeseeable newness, a death, the annihilation of something irreplaceable. It happens that a chance event changes not only our circumstances but also our identity. The economic downturn and three successive years of drought, and he was forced to sell the farm, which had been in the family for three generations. A fall, an injury, and she was no longer a dancer; she has to become someone else. On the second day of the Fifteenth Conference of the Association for Medical Humanities held in Dartington, Cornwall, we gather in a small theater. Emily greets each of us as we enter. She is perhaps forty, wears a big bouffant silver-blond wig, scarlet lipstick, deep eyeshadow, and very long false eyelashes like a cabaret performer— no, a drag queen. She sashays provocatively before us. She is wearing a pale blue hospital gown. When we are all seated on the banked rows of seats, she tells of how she became a woman. “I learnt that if you are young and beautiful and you offer tired, thirsty travelers ripe, juicy grapes they will do whatever you want, so long as you are dressed in green.” She dances and says she had a big poster of Patrick Swayze over her bed when she was fourteen. “I am dangerous. I am inside you. A little kiss, a little bite, creeping through you. My fingers will spread through your body. My tongue will lick from the inside out.” She tells us these things in raucous slang and with the wanton gestures of a cabaret performer. She is making the turns in her story goofy. She takes off the hospital gown; under it she is wearing another hospital gown, decorated with ribbons and red net petticoats, French cancan knickers. She undoes the top ribbons and slowly lowers the gown to reveal her flat chest with no nipples. “I got the first of my scars and lost my hair. I lost my left breast. The right one went as well. My ovaries are next on the list. This is how I forgot how to be a woman.” She does a provocative dance in the red net petticoats, wig, cosmetics with Patrick Swayze portraying Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, possessed with the force to hold him in life.2 She leaves, then returns, now no longer in costume, sits with us to listen to us. To a question, she explains that when she was pregnant with her first child they discovered a lump in her left breast. She did not have a full mastectomy, as the anesthetic would have been too strong for the baby, but a year later she had a recurrence and so had the mastectomy. A further year

34 / Part II: Chance

later they found she had a BRCA1 gene variant that necessitated the second mastectomy and oophorectomy in order to prevent ovarian cancer or another breast cancer. “Who, what am I?” she said. “ My body is no longer that of a female,” she said. “I am no longer female.” She says she never considered a breast reconstruction, as she doesn’t want to make her cancer invisible or endure further surgery. She says she finds her scars very beautiful. The recognition of necessity, the recognition of causality or law, is an act of understanding and reason. The recognition of choice is the recognition of possibilities. The recognition of chance is the recognition of something unforeseeable and unpredictable. The recognition of chance is anxiety and exhilaration. Anxiety and fear are the visceral sense of risk, of bad luck, that fills our minds and saturates our nervous sensibility and our musculature, our bodies. Confrontation with chance, with the unpredictable, provokes intense activity in the mind that seeks to understand but thwarts resolution and decision. I knew that Owen and Alexa, married when in graduate school, had wanted a child born of their love but had delayed until both had secured teaching positions. The pregnancy now went well, Alexa noting that in comparison with some of her friends she suffered little from morning sickness, heartburn, constipation, or back pain, and even fatigue was minimal. But one night she was rushed to the hospital and delivered a baby girl. At twentyfour weeks. They named her Claudia. The doctor asked Owen and Alexa if they wished Claudia to be on palliative care or put in a neonatal intensive care incubator. Owen found on the Internet statistics for very premature infants, those born after twenty-three to twenty-five weeks of gestation. If they are given palliative care, they will die. Of those who are given neonatal intensive care 62 percent survive; 38 percent die. 27 percent will survive without moderate to severe neurodevelopmental impairment. 38 percent will survive with moderate to severe neurodevelopmental impairment, such as cognitive impairment, cerebral palsy, autism, deafness or blindness, psychosis, bipolar disorder, or depression. 18 percent will survive with profound neurodevelopmental impairment.

The Netherlands has a national policy not to put infants born at less than twenty-five weeks gestation in intensive care.

Cause, Choice, Chance / 35

The doctor explained that they could choose palliative care for their very premature infant, a care aimed at making her short life as painless and peaceful as possible. He gently but honestly told them there was some risk that even with the most conscientious palliative care the infant might suffer. Owen and Alexa thought with anxiety of day after day visiting their infant doomed to die. They forced themselves to think of how afterward they would deal with their decision. To resolve the doubts, misgivings, and desolate memories that may trouble them, they would not have those consoling words (perhaps the only honest consoling words in face of tragedy), “You have done everything you could.” Owen and Alexa recognized that if they chose intensive care Claudia could be among the 38 percent who die in the neonatal intensive care unit. They hoped that she would be among the 27 percent who survive without moderate to severe neurodevelopmental impairment. How does one weigh a 27 percent chance of a healthy life against a 56 percent chance of death or profound impairment? They had to assess whether they would be able to bear the financial costs of the lifelong care of Claudia if she were to survive with severe neurodevelopmental impairment. Owen and Alexa could not keep from thinking of their mental and emotional strengths and the professional and social activities that made their lives meaningful to them, which would have to give room to care for a possibly severely impaired child. They wondered if they could want to have another child. They thought of the impact a severely impaired child would have on the time and resources they would devote to another child. They consulted the doctor who delivered Claudia and who had had experience with very premature infants. But they wondered: was he saying what he thought they would do if they understood all factors involved? Was he taking account of how he thought they would or could handle the decision and its consequences? Was he saying what he would do if he were the parent? In this situation with so many factors unknown, they wanted to hear the experiences and thoughts of other parents who had put a very premature infant in neonatal intensive care. They found that they had to envision the circumstances and character of those other parents and also assess the reasoning that led to their decision. They met parents who resolved the uncertainties by deciding on the basis of principles that they had decided were certain and that they appealed to and reaffirmed to make their decision. Religious principles, for example.

36 / Part II: Chance

They thus delivered themselves from uncertainties and the risks of a decision that they would perhaps later regret. But finding themselves now in a situation where the risks in so important a decision were undecidable made Owen and Alexa see that to take those principles as certain was a decision those parents made in the past. Owen and Alexa had not made such a decision. The will to open our eyes and our life to the length, breadth, and depth of what comes to pass drives us in extreme pleasure and extreme pain. Without anxiety— without extreme anxiety— chance would not even be perceived. Experience, that inner rending by which we open to the unforeseeable, unpredictable, and unmanipulable, is painful. Pain undermines our firm stand on familiar ground; every pain is a chance to catch sight of an unknown happiness. We were taking a drive in the countryside outside of Melbourne. Paul was telling me about one of his patients, a young woman of twenty-two, who had an aggressive breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy and now aggressive radiation and chemotherapy. Her family was comfortable enough, but she had not gone on to college and recently had been working as a salesperson in a women’s clothing boutique. “One can skim over the world, skim over life,” Paul said after a while. “Have a job, just doing each day what there is to be done. Evenings, weekends, talking on the phone with whoever is there. Watching whatever is on television.” I thought of days, weekends like that. “Like it’s one distraction after another,” I said. “Like not a distraction from what you chose to do or what is important. Every distraction is a distraction from another distraction.” “Sometimes a serious illness,” Paul said hesitantly, “might be the best thing that happens to a person. The occasion to work to see what is important and what frivolous. What people are important to you, what activities, what pleasures. The occasion to get a sense of oneself as someone distinct who will one day disappear.” The intellect, the reasoning, reckoning intellect tracks down regularities, bases predications on past regularities. This kind of calculative intellect belongs with action, for our initiatives, our projects count on regular patterns in the environment being repeated. But chance quickens the will. There is excitement, exhilaration in taking

Cause, Choice, Chance / 37

chances. Gamblers know this exhilaration, but we also know it in climbing high ladders to paint window frames on the second floor of our house, in speeding on the highway. Chance is caught sight of in events that befall us and cast before us superabundant gifts. Chance suddenly supplies resources for an undertaking I had not dreamed of; a chance discovery in a laboratory brings me a cure for a malignant condition that had kept me an invalid for twenty years. Chance offers a radiant midwinter day. A chance encounter brings me a lover. Cameron is the veterinarian whose clinic is closest to my place; I have gone to him with ailing animals and birds. Over the years I have occasionally met Melissa. When you see Cameron and Melissa together, you see they are in love. The way they look at one another. The way each attentively follows whatever the other is saying. The way their hands easily touch one another. Love, that attachment to him out of dozens, hundreds of men she met over the years, that attachment to her out of all the women he has met. I discovered that some of the paintings, austere minimalist abstractions, in the veterinary clinic were done by Melissa. Her day job was in a women’s shoe store. Cameron was thirty-one when they met. A dating agency would not have matched them up. Melissa had brought in a blue-gray-barred pigeon that she had rescued from a neighbor’s cat. The pigeon had flopped about without being able to take off and fly; what was she to do? The receptionist said, “We do not treat street pigeons.” Cameron stepped into the waiting room. He said, “We do not treat street pigeons.” Melissa said, “I think he— or she— has a broken wing.” Cameron took an X-ray of the wings. Melissa watched him clean the wound and set the little broken bones. “What do I owe you?” Melissa asked. “Nothing,” Cameron said. “We do not treat street pigeons.” Melissa returned a few days later with the bird for Cameron to clean the wound and change the dressings. Three weeks later Cameron removed the dressings and waved his hands up and down with the pigeon, who lifted off and fluttered around the room. He opened the window and they watched the pigeon fly off to a nearby tree. They went outside to look at the pigeon; it was well. And Cameron and Melissa looked at one another with tenderness. Nothing is more contrary to love than to interrogate, to seek to explain that magnetism, that sorcery, to imagine everything in her or his behavior predictable. Nothing is more contrary to love than to exclude strokes of luck, of good luck, and therefore to exclude strokes of bad luck too.

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Immanuel Kant defined happiness as the abiding state of satisfaction of all our needs and wants. But the English word happiness derived from Old English “hap” (chance, fortune), and meant lucky, favored by fortune. From Greek to Irish, most of the European words for “happy” at first meant “lucky.”3 Surprise is essential to happiness. See “happen,” “happenstance,” “perhaps.” Happiness is not an enduring good, is not acquired by character management and merit, is not ruled by the morality of good and evil. It is the state of someone lucky to have found this man or woman to love as no one else can love him or her. It is the state of someone who finds the earth lucky that it has glaciers, sequoias, hummingbirds, chameleons. Who finds himself lucky to be able to help, to give directions to a stranger on the street, to protect the rain forests, to safeguard the Ozark big- eared bats. Moments of supreme happiness— after a laborious trek through forest reaching a cliff over the ocean where radiant colors vibrate the skies like driftings of euphoria, watching comets flicker across the desert sky, seeing a wild turkey parade across the lawn with ten downy chicks, greeting one’s grandmother recovered from surgery after a car crash, receiving one’s newborn infant in one’s arms. The supreme happiness surges like a gift of chance; no satisfaction achieved through planning and labor is akin. The sense that the given is given, is a gift of chance, is gratitude. Gratitude is active: it consists in receiving with embracing hands what is given, holding it together, and showing it to, sharing it with others. Happiness is radiant; it gives freely to passersby, to fields and forests, to mountaintops, to the coral reefs, to the depth of the earth, not asking anything in return, not even thanks. “West Penwith is at the toe of the foot of Cornwall, perched on a massive upwelling of granite. At the rugged north- west edge igneous rock bursts through the hills, exposing high cliffs hovering over windswept beaches.”4 Everything looks random, the shape of the rocks, the foaming crests of the waves, the gusts of wind, the drifting clouds. Sam Bleakley was born in Penzance. When he was five, his father took him with him on surfboards into the waves of the ocean. Sam grew up in love with the ocean. “The wave rises, heavy and thick at the base, light and crisp at the lip as it peaks and throws, breaking free from the anchor that is the deep swell, the incessant tidal motion, the undercurrent, the pulse, the bass-line. As the wave throws bright foam heads, it plays an improvised run against the background mordros, round blue notes against a big beat. Waves are a delicate presence weaved into the sea’s force.”5

Cause, Choice, Chance / 39

“Nature makes no noise,” Thoreau wrote. “The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them.”6 Sam grew in love with the sound of the waves. The sound of the sea and the movement of the waves are unpredictable, improvisational, but harmonious melody, like free jazz. Surfing, along with kiteboarding, snowboarding, parachuting, rock climbing, parkour, is considered an adventure or extreme sport, one that has a high level of inherent danger. In the eyes of the public participants are taken to be thrill seekers, enjoying a brush with death. Surfing is indeed dangerous. “One slip and your skin is sloughed, your bones ready to show. Even the smallest contact with those electric coral heads will cut, and without quick treatment an infected wound follows.”7 Burst eardrums cannot be restored. But surfers and other adventure sports enthusiasts find their pleasure in attaining a high level of knowledge of their unpredictable terrains and great skill acquired in situations of extreme difficulty.8 “Speed is essential to surfing. It is about confidence and rapid decision, positioning, getting in the pocket, but also using the body as a motor, making your way into the sweet spot rather than waiting for it to happen.”9 “For me, control through style became the goal of surfing. I modelled this on a supposed conversation between bird and fish (or, strictly, mammal)— the equipoise of the hovering kestrel and the grace and playfulness of the dolphin, with its sudden bursts of power, and the balance between keeping the beat and improvising a solo that is central to jazz. . . . Control is poise and presence, not force or arrogance; poetics, not persuasion.”10 “The top end of ecstasy in the perfect moment— the tube ride, long hang ten or big wave drop— is a small part of surfing’s endless grind and challenge in paddling, duck diving, wipeouts, shark anxieties, bodily wear and tear (because the joints and ligaments give way long before the will). . . . This is not masochism, but living the blues, improvising life, making meaning.”11 The causal determinisms that we track down in our physics and chemistry explain why when we view the sun at the horizon the layers of atmosphere reflect light to us of varying wavelengths but do not explain why one sunset is more beautiful than another or why a sunset is beautiful. Our botany and biology do not make predictable that the flowers of trilliums are beautiful, that the plumage of pheasants is more beautiful than that of geese, that one Chinese woman but not her sister is beautiful. It is by chance that there is beauty in the world. See this. See the intricate designs of tiny Alpine and huge tropical flowers, the powdery wings of butterflies and moths, the colors of the 319 species

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of hummingbirds that are not due to pigment but to the way the crystalline cells of their minuscule feathers reflect the light. See the streaming colors of the coral fish and the tiny rainbows flashing briefly on bubbles in the surf. See how setting sun emblazons the skies with unnamable colors different every evening, different every minute of the evening.

PA R T I I I

Passions

The Mind is made up of innumerable fragments: mouths, breasts, beatings, postures, smells, decorations, tattoos, music, genitals, symbols, humiliation, invasions, anxiety, danger, masquerades, foolishness, disgust, hopes, the dorsal but never the ventral surface of the left (much more than the right) earlobe. — Robert Stoller, Intimate Communications

The Altiplano

We had planned to rent a 4x4 and drive it ourselves, but the rental agencies charged twice what a vehicle with driver cost. We soon understood why; the dirt roads were unmarked, mechanics were hundreds of kilometers apart, and even Ken, swashbuckler at the wheel, was unashamed not to be driving when we began to see how far we would have to drive in a day before coming upon a place to find food and lodging and on what roads up and over mountain passes— rattlesnake roller coasters made of dirt. Our driver, Celco, a Quechua, short and stocky, with a crown of dense black hair he parted in the middle, spoke very clear Spanish. He was mostly silent, swinging the ’98 Land Cruiser between the rocks and around the blind turns of the road. Four times we stayed put to wander the towns and terrain by ourselves, agreeing to meet Celco some days later. He didn’t say, and we didn’t ask, where he slept. Between southern Peru and northern Chile the Andes split into two mountain chains, the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Real, both broken along their length by active volcanoes. Between them is the Altiplano, the most extensive area of high plateau on Earth outside of Tibet, averaging about 3,750 meters (12,300 feet) in altitude. At the end of the Pleistocene the whole Altiplano was covered by the vast Lake Ballivián. It then drained, leaving in the northern end of the Altiplano Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America and the highest commercially navigable lake in the world, and where the Inca god Viracocha emerged and created the sun, the stars, and the first people. Some seventy-five kilometers south of the lake, at a thousand-meter-deep cut in the Altiplano the Spanish found gold and on the canyon walls built the city of La Paz. Leaving La Paz, we drove through hours of snow, but from there on it looked like, since Lake Ballivián had dried out, no rain cloud had ventured

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this way again. The frenetic winds were still trying to find some H2O molecules to flush out of the rocks and whooshed upon us, furious that there was some moisture in the pores of our skin. In the cloudless sky the sunlight was like radiation; when the sun set, the black and cold of outer space descended. No trees at this height, sometimes rocky plains devoid of any vegetation at all. The Altiplano extended before us uninhabited and uninhabitable, as Ken said, unspoiled and, as far as our science-fiction imagination could see, unspoilable. We came upon a sizzling volcano and below it a big lake cobalt blue with minerals dissolved in it, then in another hundred kilometers a volcano and its jade-green lake, then an acid-red lake, the winds finger-painting with the colors. Then a huge but shallow lake with flamingos sipping the blue-green algae. At a place called Sol de Mañana, geysers, bubbling mud pots, swirls of steaming sulfurous fumaroles. I had never felt so hellishly uneasy—Angst. Another hundred kilometers and we stopped to wander among big upright shards of rock standing here and there over waves of creamy sand and carved by the wind into petrified dragons. A vast mineral tranquility. Nestled against the rocks there were emerald-green mounds a foot or two high with glittering hard crystalline surfaces. “They are plants,” Celco explained. “We call them yaretas. This one is probably three thousand years old.” Another day we saw from a distance the walls of an ancient city; we went up to see. “It’s a fortress hewn by the wind spirits,” Ken exclaimed. Then we came upon the Salar de Uyuni, which Celco said the natives call the Salar de Tunupa after the sacred volcano on its edge. As far as eye could see the ground had flattened and gleamed white. An enormous flooring of salt. Its surface was set in hexagonal salt tiles eighteen inches to two feet across, but every hexagon was stretched or squeezed out of shape by the pushy contiguous hexagons. We found statistics in the guidebook: the Salar covers 1,2000 square kilometers (4,700 square miles), is up to 20 meters (66 feet) deep, contains at least ten billion tons of salt. Where did it all come from? Twenty thousand years ago, explained the scientist who condescended to write the guidebook, all this was covered by Lake Tauca, 140 meters (460 feet) deep. The salt— ten billion tons of it!— is the residue of all that ocean water hoisted up to this altitude (3,653 meters, 11,985 feet) by the collision of tectonic plates. Simple mechanical explanation— but unimaginable. Is “collision” the right word? Earth’s tectonic plates move at about the speed that fingernails grow. We crossed to the middle of the Salar to the Isla Incahuasi, meaning, Celco said, “Island of the Inca’s House,” a hill of rocks porous and sharp

The Altiplano / 47

like coral out of which rise thousands of giant cacti, the males poking up in thick prickly phalluses, the females budding offspring on their bodies. Some of them were twenty or thirty feet high. A sign in front of a big one said that they grow a centimeter a year and this one was nine hundred years old. Nearby a big fallen one, its sign said it had lived 1,029 years. The Inca had left it be; cranky winds had pushed it, and its great weight did it in. I said to Celco that Ken’s last name is Hombre de Sal— Saltman. He laughed and drove us to the edge of the Salar and a hotel made entirely of salt. We were the only guests. We strolled through its corridors and climbed to the rooftop terrace to see thousands of stars glittering over and in the vast white mirror below, Ken planning to come redo his wedding here, this time in full white gown and white tuxedo. We went to sleep under the domed ceilings of our rooms, from which fragile salt stalactites descended. The Lago Colorado draws thousands of flamingos to it, into it. But in a long day’s drives across the Altiplano we saw no animal life but small groups of vicuñas and small black and white eagles. Vicuñas are gregarious; eagles are solitary. Philosophers since Aristotle have affirmed that humans are social animals, but have there not always been humans as solitary as eagles? Of our closest relatives, chimpanzees are gregarious, orangutans solitary. Today, when half of humanity has assembled in cities where, whenever people are not talking to others facing them, they talk into cell phones, there subsists a powerful drive for solitude. In the cities there are people who live alone, and there have always been people who lived alone in forests and deserts, people who left clan and homeland to wander, never to return. How little we understand them! They left no explanations of their drives and longings. Our psychologists have no journals or autobiographies to scrutinize and interpret; indeed today’s psychologists devote themselves instead to locating broken human relations, in infancy and in domestic situations, in order to reconnect them. There are, however, two quite different bodies of literature in our Western culture composed by those who sought solitude. There are the sayings of the Desert Fathers in Egypt and the Sinai of the third century CE and writings by their successors living in eremitic monasteries throughout the centuries of Christianity. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, there is the Romantic literature, writings by Goethe, Kleist, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hawthorne. In both these traditions, we see the compulsion to break out of the closed network of human relations in which an individual finds he or she constructs the work, meaning, and worth of his or her life in the eyes and in the

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judgment of other humans. The Desert Fathers, and the Romantics, found that they were actors on a small artificial stage, their lives reduced to gestures and utterances responding to the gestures and utterances of other actors on that stage. The Desert Fathers, and the sages of Buddhism, were driven by the sense that outside of that stage there is reality, vast, uncomprehended, and unsuspected by those utterances and gestures. They fled the harmonious and beautiful forms that please to the sublime and terrible forests, deserts, and mountains, where they sensed a divine region hovered. In the crowds and cities, as on a stage, they had felt their lives possessed by others, condensed to utterances and gestures commanded by others. Now, in the wilderness, they understood that the craving to grasp things, to possess their meanings, the egoism, had to be overcome. They had to empty the mind and the soul, even of their longing for substantiality and individuality, so as to exist as a pure welcoming of the vastness and sublimity of reality. Indeed, has any one of us who has spent time alone in nature not experienced the heightened sensibility that soon comes and with it the fading out of one’s touchy concern with one’s identity, status, and boundaries? The Romantics also felt the compulsion to escape from the network of human relations, from the stage on which the work, meaning, and worth of one’s life are constructed, but they instead pursued a unique individuality. They felt that deep within themselves are forces that on the stage are compressed into common forms— forces that are creative both of a person’s distinctive individuality and of the individuality of his or her thoughts, emotions, actions, and works. Rather than emptying themselves of “egoism,” the Romantics strove to discover, uncover, affirm, and release the wellspring of energies within. Yet it is striking that they too left the city for nature, for long solitary walks in forests and mountains and in foreign lands. Has any one of us who has spent time alone, allowing free rein to his or her impulses, insights, and imagination, not experienced a heightened resurgence of memories and a spontaneous development of narration, about ourselves, about our lives? The Desert Fathers aimed to vacate their minds and souls to lucidly see and welcome the creativity outside, the creativity of vast seen and unseen reality. They sought the jouissance or ecstasy that opens indefinitely upon the unlimited. The Romantics aimed to release the forces within themselves to create poetry and artworks and to create their lives as poetry and artwork. Affirming the boundaries of their identity, they also sought to produce closed, completed artworks.

The Altiplano / 49

The judgment of contemporary culture has discredited both the Desert Fathers and their successors and the Romantics. To flee the stage where we figure as utterances and gestures answering to utterances and gestures can, we are now assured, produce neither understanding nor art. Social linguists and anthropologists commonly affirm that language determines how we think. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that thought takes form in language, and that original thought is a coherent deformation of the paradigms of language.1 Yet there are people who make art alone, ignorant of art history and the art world, art not produced for others. People living alone in rural areas, or in rented rooms in cities, autistic people, people incarcerated in prisons, people in asylums for the insane. Some of them make works of great intricacy; some make thousands of works. They elaborate their restless and searching mental life in images, without communicating them to others, perhaps because not communicating them with others. Over on the Cordillera Real side we went up to see the mountain that had drawn thousands of people to it, into it: the silver mountain, Cerro Rico. It rises in a symmetrical cone, looking as serene and spiritual as Mount Fuji. From it in two centuries the Spanish extracted, or rather the Spanish had their slaves extract, tons upon tons of pure silver. At the bottom of the mountain they built Potosi, at 4,090 meters (13,420 feet) above sea level the highest city in the world. In the seventeenth century Potosi had over 200,000 inhabitants, comparable to Madrid, Rome, or Paris. The silver gave out and now the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We spent five days in Potosi, exploring the streets made narrow and crooked to break the icy winds that roar through the city. It is a city like no other, the highest city with the most brutal climate; it exists because of the mountain Cerro Rico, from which, in two centuries, forty-five thousand tons of pure silver were extracted— 60 percent of all the silver mined in the world. The Spanish owners lived in fabled luxury, the city filled with mansions and ballrooms, theaters and churches. At the old Mint we learned that nine thousand tons of silver were delivered to the Spanish monarchy. In 1570 Ming China converted from paper money to silver and began massively importing silver from Mexico and from Potosi, 150 tons annually via Europe and 50 tons annually via Manila. The massive export of silver led to its inevitable devaluation and to the growing inability of Spain to finance its wars to protect the empire.2 To see this city was to see still those mansions, theaters, churches, to look down into the centuries past; it was also

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not simply to see it set in a landscape dominated by the Cerro Rico but in a map marked with mule roads down to the coast and navigation routes to Madrid, Manila, and China. In 1572 the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo instituted La Ley de la Mita, which required all Indians over eighteen to work twelve-hour shifts in the mines and eat and sleep underground for four months at a time. So many died from collapses of tunnels, noxious gases, pulmonary silicosis, and mercury poisoning that the Spanish began importing African slaves. Hundreds of thousands of Indians and African slaves died in the mines before the silver was depleted. The mines closed in 1783, and the city quickly depopulated; by 1825 it was reduced to eight thousand people. Fifty years later mining began for tin; gradually the city has filled again, now to a population of 200,000. There are still small teams of men and children working small mines on the mountain, hoping to find a residual silver vein, with the same primitive methods as in the past. We chewed coca to neutralize dizziness from the altitude and walked the narrow streets lined with crumbling mansions, seeing more shops selling alcohol than we had seen in any other city. Looking at the walls of this city, we gaped into the abysses of the past, unable to understand or picture the depravity that had built these mansions, these churches, this city. We did not speak with any of the people in the streets and wondered where they buried the tens of thousands of Indians and African slaves. In this city we were alone, surrounded by the ghosts of the dead, unable to make contact with them. We came upon the Convent of Saint Teresa. At the entrance we were told to wait for the guide. She took three hours to show us the convent. The Discalced Carmelites, she explained, were founded by the Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. The convents never housed more than twenty- one nuns. This one, founded in 1685, was for women from noble families. The guide showed us the door where the young woman was brought by her family, divested of her fine clothing, her head shaven, and clad in a rough wool habit. She would never see her family again; when they visited, once a month, she would greet them from behind a grill covered with black cloth. The guide showed us the unheated cell where the nun slept on a bed of boards without mattress or mat and where she prayed, bent over on the stone floor. The Discalced Carmelites are a contemplative order; they live in silence, speaking but two hours a day while working the gardens and weaving. We were shown room after room of religious paintings that would honor any national museum. We were shown room after room of church vestments woven, brocaded, and embroidered by the nuns. On them flowers

The Altiplano / 51

that emerged in the brief rains from the rocky soil of their walled gardens were glorified in delicate forms and subtle hues. With the decline of the city, the convent too had been emptied, but some years ago five nuns, four from Bolivia and one from Brazil, came here and live in a cloistered part of the building. Here in the midst of the biggest and richest city of the world, women from the richest families had withdrawn into solitude and contemplation of another, vaster, unseen reality. These women, long dead, and those now in the convent, unseen, somehow signed to us in our solitude. Out in the Altiplano, in these vast stretches of mineral landscape, we stopped whenever we saw in the distance shy groups of vicuñas or eagles; we sat before the Lago Colorado to watch the first groups of flamingos returning from Chile to build their nests here. The whole Altiplano is above the tree line; over vast stretches there is no vegetation at all, just the now desiccated ancient lake bed and the mountains in great pours of black, crimson, rose, cream, ochre, white minerals, as the continent looked under the unfiltered ultraviolent rays of the sun before the first lichens and mosses emerged from the oceans. Long ago J. M. G. Le Clézio named “material ecstasy” that leap in the core forces of life that makes contact with what is most inhuman and alien— the mineral and gaseous vastness of reality.3 In the mineral purity of the Salar de Tunupa, in the mountainscape thrust up by tectonic collisions, in the restless volcanoes, we found ourselves in geological and cosmic space and time. At the base of the volcano Tunupa we came upon a village of stone houses whose thatched roofs had disappeared. But there was left one man, perhaps about sixty, who had collected the abandoned utensils and tools along with skulls of animals and different kinds of rocks and ores in a small building, his museum of the abandoned village that had been Chautani. And in a space on the edge of the high ground he had brought rocks of strange color and shape and planted them with the deliberation of a Japanese landscape artist. Some he had carefully cemented into abstract totems. We lingered long in the enchanted stone garden. He had elected to live out his days alone, assembling the works of cosmic and geological artistry. His name was Santos Quispe. “Este hombre está loco,” he said. We shook his hand, thanked him and left without speaking with him. Perhaps because the days we had spent seeing no trace of humans in hundreds of kilometers of primal landscapes had given us a sense of the completeness and richness of his solitary life.

Return of the First Person Singular

The Science of Subjectivity and the Sciences At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a rigorous and positivist science of subjectivity. It was set up to deal with specific problems in other scientific disciplines. The discovery of paradoxes in mathematics had put in question the ultimate rationality of mathematics and of the mathematized empirical sciences. Husserl’s phenomenology worked to trace mathematics and logic back to their fundamental units and operations and to exhibit the mental acts in which they are constituted. Subsequently he judged that every scientific discipline was in need of a phenomenological investigation of the subjective acts in which the distinctive objects studied by that discipline are constituted, given to intuition, and their meanings ascribed. Empirical and ideal objects— the essences with which objects are identified and classified— are given in intuition; intuition constitutes them as objects. Intuition occurs in acts in the first person singular—“I see.” These acts can be brought to light by a specific kind of reflection, also an act in the first person singular. The successive intuitive and meaning-ascribing acts, and the second-order intuition that is reflection, retain and anticipate one another, forming a distinctive individual stream of consciousness that is the first person singular. The science of subjectivity is based on the reality of the first person singular. By midcentury developments in other sciences led to discrediting the phenomenological conception of subjectivity. Structural linguistics had exhibited system in the phonetics and syntaxes of languages and demonstrated that languages change in systematic ways. The meanings of words and expressions form within language and are determined by the existing

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vocabulary, grammar, and paradigms of a language; they are not the products of individual subjective acts. Anthropology discarded, as a post-Enlightenment Western idea, the concept of individual subjectivity as an abiding identity and source productive of meanings, judgments, decisions, and initiatives.1 It is cultural symbols that, Clifford Geertz affirms, first articulate, generate, and regenerate thought. To think is to identify things and relate them with words and other cultural symbols. Symbols are external to the thinker; they are words and also images, markings, gestures, rituals, graven idols, water holes, tools.2 Their meanings are in their uses, and the ways they are used are accessible to observation without divining the minds of the users. “The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but,” Geertz affirms, “they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation . . . as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands.”3 Thus anthropology can dispense with the dubious methods to access other minds and become a natural science like any other.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss set out to show the underlying structures, not explicitly conscious, in kinship systems, myths, garb and adornment, cuisine. He set out to show that fundamental generative structures are universal across cultures. Emotions surge focused by words and symbols. Indignation, a feeling of injustice, of frustration of our expectations and plans, envy, jealousy, triumph— words and cultural symbols, not produced by the individual mind, make them possible. “Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man,” Geertz declares.5 For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. The meanings of speech acts produced by individuals are determined from the specific tongue, milieu, profession, and social and practical situation in which they are uttered and from the distribution, condensations, and displacements of signifiers in the unconscious. Perceived things and events are not only identified with language; the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of a specific language determines what we perceive and how. Action is ordered by the material imperatives of things and the cues, watchwords, and orders of social institutions. For postmodernism, Ellen Fox Keller explains, “subjects are . . . constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or ‘performativity’ than as

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their source. . . . Selves are multiple and fractured rather than unitary, mobile rather than stable, porous rather than enclosed, externally constituted rather than internal or ‘inner’ natural essences.”6 The agency in me that says “I” is not a substantive identity; it is intermittent, fragmented, transitory. Art is now no longer seen as a discontinuous succession of individual creations; its themes and styles are engendered by the history of art. Postmodern theorists have abandoned the notion of creative force in the depth of the individual, indeed the notion of creativity: a society produces innumerable materials, mediums, forms, colors, meanings; artists select and combine from this existing fund. Their productions are constituted as art by being accepted into the history of art by the institutions and commerce of the art world. The postmodern philosophy of mind is seen to be realized in the practice and usage of electronic media. Media broadcasts diffuse representations of events and products; information about everything is instantly available on the Internet. Knowledge is stored as neutral units of information, detached, as in Wikipedia, from the experience and perspective of a thinker. Cyberspace engineers and theorists see themselves producing a global brain in which potentially all things and events are represented, all data stored in memory, and linked in all possible ways, connected, combined, synthesized. Individuals connected on the Internet constitute the noosphere, the collective consciousness that emerges from all the users of the Internet and that is greater than any one of them and greater than all of them. It would be analogous to the hive mind of ant, termite, or bee colonies studied by biologists. Its axioms, paradigms, technologies of image and message production, and distribution technologies studied by cyberspace theorists and culture studies. Surveying the field of scientific research today, we see three sectors of research that break with the postmodern conception of subjectivity.

Anthropology and the Problem of the Informant Classical ethnographers observed the habitats, implements, economic activity, institutions, and beliefs of a community in view of producing an account of a particular “culture,” conceived as a functionally interrelated structure of economic, political, and ideological systems. Their work was scientific not only in the rigor of its observations but also in that the representation of a culture is translated into the vocabulary, paradigms, and explanations of scientific economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, biology, and physics.

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How are these productions of an anthropology that aims to be scientific verified? In most cases, another ethnographer does not go to that community to verify what the first has written. In most cases the members of that community cannot or do not read the account of them the ethnographer has published. In practice a monograph is accepted by the anthropological community for internal characteristics— the appearance of detailed and exhaustive data and the apparent rigor of the reasoning and conclusions drawn from them.7 Agricultural practices, housing construction, tools and equipment, economic exchanges, and kinship systems are recorded and translated into the objective terminology of modern sciences. But all these are found to be determined by the natives’ understanding of causality and the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. In practice the ethnographer sets out to learn the language, the categories, the imagery of the users of symbols and learns them by speaking to the natives and being understood by them. The anthropologist conceives the “culture” as an overarching and integrated system of symbols and representations, distinctive to a society, that provides individuals with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves in the world around them and to one another. But field researchers have come to recognize that that the ideology or mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. Pieces of the ideology and myth combine but also conflict with the practical knowledge each individual acquires of his or her particular natural environment and workplace. The discourse of the informant is also shaped by the sensibility, energies, and skills of his or her body. Consciousness waxes and wanes as sensory thresholds, states of wakefulness, fatigue, and also instincts, cravings, appetite, agitations, drives surge and recede. Two women working alongside of one another planting and harvesting crops, the one with superabundant energy, the other with slow metabolism, the one young, the other aged after multiple childbearings, do not experience the same articulation of that field, and though they use common words to describe it, the words do not have identical force and meaning for each of them. The singularity of a person’s body also figures as a force of resistance to the identities attributed to him or her by others and by the ideology. Individuals with somewhat different pieces of ideology and myth and practical knowledge interact and engender changes in practical enterprises and social institutions and also in ideology and myth. The entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. The researcher does not go unnoticed

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into every field and room, a fly on the wall. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant, commonly paid by the ethnographer, has a political and psychological relationship with that researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired. There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness. The publication, twenty- five years after his death, of Bronislaw Malinowski’s diaries— where he writes often of how he was just sick of all these truculent and fickle savages— has made ethnographers aware that they are not simply recording what an informant says but are in an obscure agon with an individual. Anthropologists write for readers in their own culture, primarily the academic community, but have to first understand and represent the native’s point of view, or more exactly, represent the individual informant’s point of view. This has led to the search in recent decades for new forms of writing.8 There is need for theory to conceptualize the forces that make the discourse of the informant his or her own voice. The mind of the informant is not simply a locus where the ideological system of his culture is inscribed; it is a force of commitment— commitment to some pieces of this system but also to his work and his maneuvers in the network of his political and psychological relations with others.

Medical Practice Anthropologists have come to see that every community has contact with other communities and imports some of the representations of other communities, modified, renamed, reversed, and assimilated, some sections badly integrated, coexisting or overlapping with sections of its own representations. In zones where a people has been invaded or conquered by another and have to contrive their lives between different economic and institutional systems with different cultural and mythical systems of interpretation, there arise cargo cult messiahs, Vodou serviteurs, ialorixás, mediums, curanderos. They deal with individuals in individual predicaments and work with parts of the Christian and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of

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what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps, to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments. Today anthropological field researchers everywhere encounter such encroachment of an alien system of understanding on communities in the entry of modern scientific medicine. With the intense and highly profitable penetration of pharmaceutical marketing across the planet, many people, especially the poor, are treated by local health workers and by their families with a mix of modern therapeutic methods and pharmaceuticals, traditional healing resources, and religious and ritual practices. Medical anthropologists set out to assess and understand the impact of healers and rituals. They come to recognize that individuals are forced to take responsibility for their illness and healing with whatever resources and understanding they can assemble.9 Medical practitioners have come to recognize the difference between a patient assenting to and obeying the doctor or the faith healer and a patient taking responsibility for his disease and its cure on the basis of his daily sufferings, observations, and judgments. Their practice will be different if the doctor has to take account of the patient taking responsibility for his or her disease and its treatment. We need a theoretical understanding of the first person singular in this force to take responsibility for one’s illness. In our Western societies folk medicine and faith healing are vanishing alternatives to scientific medical research, institutions, and practice. Medical science has constructed a highly technical vocabulary and grammar to formulate the results of its laboratory and clinical research into pathologies and their treatments. When a sufferer goes to the doctor, the doctor translates the patient’s account of his ailments into this language, and the patient is induced to learn this language to understand his ailments, communicate them, and assent to treatment. Increasingly patients download explanations and treatments from the Internet before and after their consultations with the doctor. The extraordinary advance in pharmacology and high- tech surgical interventions has made this language more necessary and more difficult for the patient to master. Medical practice finds that it must also deal with economic, political, and juridical institutions. The patient must learn and understand the medical discourse and to some measure also the economic, political, and juridical discourses. But the patient has also to endure the suffering and to assess its impact on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead, and the death that he has to face. For all this, the medical discourse is of no avail. Indeed the real and promised advances of medical biotechnology, organ

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transplants and prostheses, and life-support systems work to defer death, rendering suffering and death intolerable and unintelligible. The sufferer has to elaborate a narrative of her aspirations and her fate, her destiny, her lifetime. The patient’s narrative of that alien event in her life that is her illness will determine what treatments she will accept and may even have an effect on the efficacy of those treatments. This narrative is composed not out of concepts but out of bewilderment, anxieties, fears, attachments, dereliction, and pain. The sufferer gets sight of the indifference of the material world, the impenetrability of brute reality, gets sight of the aleatory, improbable reality of his or her existence. Suffering and anxiety are not simply cultural artifacts; they are not made possible by the words of a culture but seek words for a private language, the narrative the sufferer composes by and for himself or herself.

Creative Image Making Anthropologists who have studied mentally disturbed very poor people in Java, Brazil, and India10 find that the family of the psychotic may accept whatever therapy and psychopharmaceuticals are available while also invoking images and conceptions and rituals from the prevailing religion. These images and conceptions function to fix, to bind, the rampant strangeness of the sufferer’s experience and behavior for them. Medical anthropologists have investigated these phenomena in view of explaining the social and cultural context in which modern psychiatric practice in these places must be pursued. The psychotic himself may identify himself and his states with concepts and images from the prevailing religion. However, the psychotic works an individual transformation of them, giving them new and distinctive structures and force, often viewed as heterodox and fanatical by the family and by religious leaders. They may often be mixed with practices of black magic and sorcery. Anthropological researchers have come to recognize positive and productive forces in these heterodox beliefs and practices: they function to isolate the sufferer from his or her family and the community in a protective withdrawal that enables the psychotic to recognize the distinctiveness of his or her sufferings and anxieties, establish some kind of distance from them, and produce images and discourse of strong coherence and emotional intensity. In 1921 Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (Madness and Art) about Adolf Wölfli, interned as psychotic in the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern, Switzerland. Wölfli had spontaneously taken up

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drawing and eventually produced his imaginary biography in an epic 45 volumes of 25,000 pages with 1,600 illustrations and 1,500 collages. In 1922 Dr. Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 of the more than 5,000 paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from asylums in Heidelberg and farther afield, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Professional artists such as expressionists Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin and surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst hailed them as great art, a creativity freed from concern with competition, acclaim, and social promotion. Jean Dubuffet collected thousands of works of the insane, prisoners, and also spiritualists, mediums, and children, people ignorant of the canons and taste of the art world, calling them “art brut.” English writers refer to them as “outsider art.” Charles Dellschau, who had been a butcher, after retirement over twentyone years filled notebooks with drawings, watercolor paintings, and collages. After his death, the house where they were caught fire and everything in it was thrown into a landfill. An unknown person salvaged thirteen notebooks that then remained under a pile of old rugs in the warehouse of a used furniture dealer. They were shown in a gallery seventy-five years after his death. Henry Darger worked as a hospital orderly in Chicago. In the room where he lived he wrote, over forty- three years, the 15,145- page, singlespaced manuscript of a novel entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, illustrated with more than three hundred drawings and watercolor paintings; a novel entitled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago in fifteen volumes; and The History of My Life, 4,672 pages in eight volumes. These were discovered by the landlord when Darger was removed to a nursing home shortly before his death. James Hampton, an African American, worked as a janitor. Over fourteen years in a garage that he had rented he secretly built an elaborate religious throne surrounded by 180 sacred objects and composed a text in a script that remains undeciphered. They were discovered by the owner of the garage after his death. In 1979 some twelve hundred wire sculptures were found by a passerby in bags and cardboard boxes on trash pickup day in an alley outside a transient home in Philadelphia. Based on objects contained in the sculptures they were dated to around 1970. Despite extensive research, no one was found who knew the maker, who is now called Philadelphia Wireman. Dubuffet realized that to understand the phenomenon of art brut a new conception of the first person singular is required. He invoked the unconscious, not, as in Freud, constituted by what is foreclosed from and by con-

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sciousness but instead a wellspring of positive, creative energies, and not as impersonal but as radically individual. This image making goes beyond the working out of rational perplexities and of traumas. The sense of terrifying, mesmerizing, lascivious realms of the world and of alien and violent feelings and forces within drives the image makers of the asylum and of marginals untrained in art. These images often acquire exceptional coherence, intensity, and expressiveness through techniques and styles that result from the long and obsessive application to the same themes. Not made as art, in the ignorance of the canons and history of the art world, these images are made for oneself and often in secret. They constitute a metaphysical habitat in which the image maker dwells more and more exclusively. The postmodern philosophy of subjectivity increasingly provides theory for cultural studies, literary theory, aesthetics and art practice and for cyberspace visionaries. Will these areas of contemporary research trouble and displace this philosophy of subjectivity? To the extent that anthropology becomes a compendium of reports of individual voices, its relevance to sociologists and policy makers becomes the more negligible. The sophisticated biochemical, genetic, and surgical treatments being developed induce patients to yield decisions about their suffering to experts. The theorists of art brut early recognized that acknowledging these images made by the marginalized and the confined as art resulted in their techniques and styles being assimilated by professional artists and their works being integrated into the history of art, and in the image makers responding to the recognition and marketing of their work and producing images in response to the taste of critics and collectors. Yet these loci of subjectivity may well become more acute in the decades to come. In the measure that biotechnology extends its sway over individual lives and combats death with juridically imposed life-support systems, suffering and death become the more incomprehensible and unendurable. To the extent that anthropology reduces “culture” to a multiplicity of individual experiences, collages of representations and judgments, and individual voices, sociological generalizations become the more questionable. And perhaps the ubiquity of images may continue to induce people outside the art world to elaborate their individual visions.

Aconcagua

Cerro Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, rising to 22,837 feet, is the highest mountain in the Americas and the highest mountain outside the Himalayas. It harbors several glaciers, the largest one some ten kilometers long. I trekked its lower reaches and that evening went to a lodge at its base. At the front desk there was a self-published book entitled Aconcagua, which, after a look at it, I bought and read that evening. The author, Juan Aguilar, is a psychotherapist, based in Buenos Aires. He tells of one of his patients, Miguel, a fifty-one-year-old man, university educated, married with two children, running a successful real estate business. Miguel did not really suffer from chronic depression, but he complained that meaning had somehow gone out of his life. There were no sexual or emotional problems in his relationship with his wife, but conversation with her went down the familiar paths, and sexual intercourse had become routine caresses and strokings with the familiar relief. He had become completely knowledgeable about the real estate business and skilled in dealing with buyers and sellers, but now sales no longer surprised or exhilarated him. He made a lot of money, but spending it no longer brought satisfaction. Improvements to his house, new appliances, a new car: nothing seemed to add anything to his life. “I buy things, spend money, and then don’t see the sense of it,” he said to the therapist. “Buying and selling real estate— does that have some meaning for me, for my life? Having a home, a wife, children— is that what having a life means? Anyhow you don’t really ‘have’ a wife, children; they have their own lives. And I don’t see what that means.” After a long pause, he said, “Everything I say and do responds to what my employees say, what my customers say. After work everything I say and do answers to what my wife says, what my children say, what the neighbors say.

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Is that all there is?” He had bought some philosophy books. He had taken some philosophy courses at the university, so he felt that he could read and understand them. “But I need guidance,” he told the therapist. “And I need someone to help me connect the ideas of philosophy with my situation.” After a few sessions in which the Juan listened to his patient tell his life and his trouble, he proposed that Miguel climb Aconcagua. He said that he would accompany him. The ascent of Aconcagua by the south face takes routes that are among the most difficult that mountain climbers attempt. But ascent on the north face can be done with normal crampons, ropes, and axes. However, the almost seven-kilometer altitude, the extreme cold— the wind chill can drop to −80°F— storm winds, and avalanches make this ascent also dangerous, and Aconcagua has one of the highest mountain death tolls in the world. Juan had twice climbed it although each time turned back before reaching the summit. Privately he hoped that encouraging his patient would give him the extra drive and that this time he would attain the summit. Juan and Miguel set the date in February, midsummer, when Miguel could arrange four weeks leave from work. They had four months to prepare, keep to a healthy diet, no alcohol or cigarettes, weight training five days a week, an hour of cardio exercises daily. The book recounts the climb. Arrival at the base, days of acclimatization. Then beginning the ascent. Patches of loose rock, scree, then firn ice. Refrozen ice lenses, crevasses. The heavy fatigue as the climb rises. Unrelenting howling winds. Juan keeping up a high-spirited demeanor, to support Miguel. But beginning to doubt his own physical stamina. Times when he imagines Miguel injured or collapsing in altitude sickness, his efforts to revive him and descend to safety failing. The Hippocratic oath: first do not harm. Then the day Miguel is gasping for air, his hands immobilized with the cold, stopping, abandoning the climb the rest of the day. Juan anguished, wondering what he could possibly be risking Miguel’s life for, risking his own. Looking up to the summit, visible now, but not seeming any closer as they make less distance each day. Then the sky darkens, heavy snowfall, whiteout. They are two days from the summit. The winds hurl against them, they have to crouch and grip the ice beneath them. The mountainside and the air are clotted with white; the contours of the ice about them bleached out in the white density. They turn back, a crawling descent as the white everywhere darkens to ash gray and night falls. Miguel is hardly responsive; Juan digs alone a snow cave for the night. Four days to descend to the base camp. The book ends without the therapist relating what happened then, in

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the months and years that followed, without giving an appraisal of Miguel’s subsequent state or recounting what changes he may have made in his life. I found myself strangely gripped by this book in the following days. Miguel’s despondency and his questions were about meaning, but this therapy did not proceed by interpretation, was no talking cure. It did not show him a meaningful realm to live his life; they went to stay weeks on the brute rocks and ice of the uninhabitable mountain. A domain of grandeur, but also where the human figure and its intentions were reduced to insignificance, forms of rock and formlessness of snow and sky refusing human apprehension, the mountain driving them off. They would be agape with wonder, visions beyond the practicable and comprehensible, beyond what the human mind can imagine. They would be transfixed with anxiety and terror before dangers beyond what means they could have to parry them, suffocated in sullen physical fatigue and prostrate in the lassitude that no longer seeks to resist death. Impassioned states, that totally fill and throb in mind and body, disconnected from, disconnecting the experience and knowledge and enterprises of the past. Not opening upon a future: What was the utility of knowing these extremities of wonder, anxiety, terror, desolation, toxic lassitude? Are these not states that crush people, those who come to psychotherapy because grief, rancor, bitterness, jealousy, rage consume them and make them unable to conduct their lives? What are impassioned states? Let us separate the term “passion” from the terms “emotion,” “affect,” “feeling,” “sentiment,” and “mood.” These terms, which gained currency in the eighteenth century and have acquired the stamp of objectivity, are now the terms used in psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and legal and political discourse, as well as in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and neurobiology. They belong to a specific kind of analysis and explanation. Feelings or emotions are taken to be psychic effects of body disturbances caused by outside things or events. They are conceived as transitory events occurring to the self, which subsists behind or beneath them. Feelings and emotions produce bodily reactions, gestures, and expressions, which can be observed by others. But the self distinct from them is taken to be something invisible, unperceivable from the outside, known by only one witness, from within, a sphere of privacy. I have a sense of myself when I take a distance from my feelings, observe them, judge them. The self can manage its feelings and emotions, control them, integrate them with its intentions and projects. Let us note that the sense of the self is not constant. Much of the time the

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tasks and the implements are laid out before us each day: the toothbrush, shampoo, and shower in the morning, the bus to work, the tasks laid out in the factory or office. A layout of directives in the things. We do what there is to be done. The postures and manipulations we have picked up from others and pass on to others. In all that, we do not have a distinct sense of a self as an individual source of thoughts and decisions. What I will here call “passions” we find in Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Dostoyevsky, Melville, and in a great deal of our literature and cinema. Vehement wonder, lust, rage, courage, terror, jealousy, grief fill one’s mind and body, swollen with surging energy and heightened sensitivity. All our senses are enflamed. Impassioned states give us the experience of being self-identical and undivided. Mind and body are one. Rage saturates the mind and is felt throughout the body, in the postural axis, in the clenched fists and beating heart, the trembling limbs. Impassioned states are not experienced as events occurring to the self, which would be experienced beneath or above them. Instead, the self arises in the passion, takes form in it. In wonder or in rage the sense of self surges, the self surges, and it is an awestruck or enraged self. In impassioned states the self arises, a force that confronts, makes claims on others and on the world. Passionate outbreaks carve out space and time in distinctive ways. Impassioned wonder, rage, terror, jealousy, and desolate mourning mark out a territory where my life and my honor are cut off from what is not mine, where what is deserved is bounded from what is undeserved, where my intimates are separated from strangers. Passionate outbreaks disconnect from the public world and stake out a territory that is my space, my world. And passionate outbreaks structure time in a distinctive way. They do not take place in a never- ending line of time segmented into minutes, hours, and days, nor in the time we experience as stretching back and containing our past actions and encounters and extending forward where foreseen plans and projects are inscribed. Instead, the time of an impassioned experience disconnects from the continuum of life and nature. Passion intensely and completely fills a present. In rage or mourning this throbbing present is backed up to what has just happened. What has just happened separates from the continuously passing field. In terror what is just about to happen, what is imminent, rises in high relief before the swollen pressure of the present.1 In the unending line of the time of nature and society, there disconnects this new structure consisting of the bloated present, the immediate past, and the imminent future. In current language “having an experience” designates something un-

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expected, intense, and with a limited endurance in which it evolves and comes to an end, such that it gives rise to a narrative. Having an experience is having an impassioned experience, an experience undergone in passion. Observing an event, however unusual, is not having an experience. Awestruck wonder, that state in which our engagement in a practicable field is interrupted and we find ourselves abruptly opened upon regions and events that empty out our chattering mind and disconnect the skills and manipulations of our bodies— wonder is the fundamental impassioned state. Finding oneself, as Immanuel Kant says, beholding massive mountains treading skyward, gorges with raging streams cutting deeper in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation.2 Standing by night on the frozen tundra of the far north and seeing high overhead the northern lights shimmer their changing colors like great curtains in the black of outer space. One is isolated, in the midst of the raging electrical storm, before the vast inhuman icescape of Antarctica, which fills the whole of space about one. One is exposed and feels the pounding of life within one’s undivided mind and body. The self is this deep, primal throbbing of life, insistent and indubitable. There is an element of wonder, before the astonishing, the bewildering, the overwhelming, in every passion— in rage, in terror, in grief, in sexual passion. Impassioned lustful love is possessed with the apparition of the unforeseeable, incomprehensible in another. Erotic passion is high spirited, making claims on the world and on busied and detached others, confident and assertive. Wrath asserts “Me!” and “My people!” before events of the world, in front of others. It proclaims one’s worth and dignity. It gives rise to our primary sense of justice and injustice. We rarely break out in rage before slights to our person or our actions done by people with whom we have no friendship. Our vexation passes; their disparagement is as indifferent to us as they are. But when our cherished friends and lovers slight us, our wrath asserts how much we care for their regard and how injured we are by their disdain. How awestruck we are before the forces of courage! An individual pits his or her forces against the hateful machinations of men, against the furies of nature. Impassioned courage fills mind and body as one; the inner voice of prudence and caution is choked. Courage arises in compacted energies before threatening forces and unsurveyable menaces and takes a stand before the intolerable.

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Fatigue and pain are biological signals that alert us to harm in our organism and motivate us to act to remedy the assault it is suffering. But the awakening of passion resolves us to endure fatigue and pain. Impassioned obstinacy and courage pit their force against pain. The self rises in this obstinacy and courage, severe and bent on triumphing in them. Passionate mourning is not simply an impotent sense of loss. It involves the claim that the loss of one’s beloved, one’s child, is unjust, unacceptable; it maintains this claim against the fates. It takes courage to mourn passionately. In impassioned fear, terror, we find ourselves before imminent death in battle, in earthquakes, in flaming buildings, or when we are first told that the doctors have identified a disease in its terminal phase. We find ourselves overwhelmed, shattered, paralyzed, but also energized to scream and curse in refusal and to flee. There is some element of terror in impassioned envy, jealousy, and melancholy. A passionate state, which fills mind and body, disconnects from the patterns of the past and blocks foresight of consequences, shuts off the warnings and counsel of prudence and rationality. A passionate state also excludes other passionate states.3 An enraged person is unafraid, but panic chokes anger and launches flight. Greed shuts out empathy and grief before the misfortune of others, grief over the death of a rich relative. It is striking that impassioned states transform in a certain direction. Terror characteristically passes into shame. Impassioned jealousy turns into rage. Rage often turns into mourning. Impassioned ambition often issues into guilt, although guilt does not typically turn into ambition. Unrequited love curdles into hatred. “In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale . . . King Leontes . . . passes from jealousy to rage, from rage to remorse, from remorse to mourning, and, finally, from mourning to wonder.”4 Let us then separate two realms, the world of passions and the world of emotions. Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Milton, Dostoyevsky show us a world where events are launched, counteracted, redirected, consummated, and consumed in impassioned states. Recent literature such as Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude show the eruption of passions forcing the zigzag lines that plot the lives of individuals and of a community. We today understand and share the passions recounted in Homer; passionate states are transhistorical and transcultural. And we share them with other species, rabbits terrorized by dogs, enraged pheasants defending their chicks against predators, elephants and dolphins that mourn their dead.

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Economist Albert Hirschman found that seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury political philosophers declared that a political system must promote avarice, calculus of one’s interests, above all, because avarice blocks out the disruptive intervals of anger, grief, falling in love, as well as shame, regret, and mourning which cling to the past.5 The writings of these political philosophers forcefully added to the discrediting of the passions. A psychology that would enjoin us to take a distance from passions, view them objectively, from the outside, as others view them, that pathologizes the passions, is in fact assigning priority to everyday life in the political economy set up to maximize order and productivity, making it normative. But then we have to recognize that this life can be emptied by the erosion of meaning. The psychotherapist Juan Aguilar had taken Miguel from a world devoted to order and productivity, where emotions are to be integrated into practical initiatives, supplying them with their energies, to a world of awestruck wonder, terror, and defiant courage. Impassioned states are not reactions proportionate to the situation; they are excessive. Our organisms are material systems in which, through excretion, secretion, evaporation, lacks develop, which are experienced as needs. These open the organism to the outside; its senses scan the environment, and the organism moves to take hold of substances and sustenance to satisfy its needs. The pleasure in needs satisfied closes in on the content in contentment and rest. But our organisms are material systems that generate energies, energies in excess of what they require to satisfy their needs. Impassioned outbreaks surge with excess energies generated within. There is the pride of standing forth, the thrill of rushing onward, the melodic movements that pick up the throbbing rhythm of events and landscapes. The surging of energies felt in exuberance seeks out the muscle strains and fatigue of hard labor and hard play, which intensify one’s sense of surging energies, one’s sense of oneself. Wrath and terror respond to powerful and unexpected threats to our domain or our life. But awestruck wonder seeks out the grandiose and the terrible. High-spiritedness greets the collapse of methodic manipulations, the absurdity of events in human society and in nature, seeks them out to affirm them in peals of laughter. Friedrich Nietzsche separated the surging of energies that are used for self-aggrandizement from the joyous exhilaration that releases excess energies without asking anything in return. These last he called the noble moments in life.6 For Georges Bataille passions arise in the transgression of boundaries and taboos. Nature and society set limits to where we can go and what we

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can do. Beyond lies the unknown, the unpredictable, danger. Our excess energies drive us to plunge across the boundaries and taboos in exhilaration and anxiety. Anxiety in sensing danger and death. Exhilaration in sensing the surge of superabundant energies within. Passions are made of exhilaration and anxiety. They plunge into the unknown, the unknowable, the unmanipulable, the unpracticable.7 One never regrets having made a fool of oneself for sex or for love. One regrets not having dared. In erotic passion we know extreme pleasure and extreme anxiety. Lust is addressed to the other, in whose visible and palpable materiality there stir unknown visions, dreams, longings. We violate the space of another, break through the identity that others constitute for the other and that the other assumes for him- or herself. We disrobe the other and ourselves, setting aside the protection and uniforms that clothe the body in the posts and functions of productive work and society. Our practical posture collapses; we abandon our limbs and organs to another, abandon dignity and selfrespect and identity. We drift in moaning and sighs, exhalations, the opacity of pleasure and night. Impassioned states are not simply transitory outbursts; they give rise to passionate attachment to things. Passionate attachments are quite different from the utilitarian attachment to things, or the attachment to things for their symbolic value. As passionate attachments philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cite food, for compulsive eaters, bulimics, and anorexics; a dress, lingerie, or shoes, for fetishists; a domestic dog or cat.8 But so many things can function as the point of passionate attachment— a butterfly collection, a cabin in the wilderness, an endangered species of bird, the silverback gorillas of Rwanda, an adopted child, a young man in one’s building in advanced stages of AIDS. One is attached not merely to symbols but to the dense and enigmatic reality of something alien to oneself. It is striking that passionate attachments are exclusive. Of the hundreds of women one meets over the years, one falls passionately in love with this one. Composing sounds into a music the world has never before heard, putting paints on canvas can appear to a man or a woman worth devoting all one’s energies and resources, all one’s life to. In the attachment to things for their utilitarian function or for their symbolic value, the self asserts its independence and sovereignty. But in passionate attachment the self undergoes metamorphosis. In one’s attachment to a cat or a horse one feels the vital movements of cats or horses within oneself, and one senses one’s sentiments and impulses in cats or horses. A fetishist sees lingerie animated with his voluptuous languor and feels the shimmering sleekness of lingerie in the shifting flesh of his body. A hunter acquires

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the sharp eyes, wariness, stealthy movement, speed, readiness to spring and race, and the exhilaration of the beast he hunts, which are available for stalking prey but also for gamboling down the hills into the river, dancing, and sexual contests. A mountaineer acquires the hardness, rigor, obstinacy, endurance, and taciturnity of the mountain. In erotic passion one feels oneself existing in the other’s attachment to one, in the sense the other has of one; one becomes his or her lover. And the other feels him- or herself existing in the intensity of the lover’s attachment to him or her, becomes the beloved. Passionate love does not produce communion or fusion but instead an intense sense of oneself lodged in the other and an intense sense of the other lodged in oneself. Passion discovers ever more enigmas in the object of its attachment, in increasing wonder and beguilement, moves in dread before its or her vulnerability, wrath before what threatens him or her. Ever more vehement passions crowd into it. Friedrich Nietzsche contrasts passionate knowledge (of a woman, a silverback gorilla, a landscape) with the observation that takes a distance from them as objects, the observation we call “objective.” Passionate attachment moves through different passions, each revealing a new perspective and depth.9 We do not think we know a woman through a series of anatomical, psychological, cultural, sociological observations. We think we do not know a woman until we have melted before her kindness and feared her wrath, been anguished before her vulnerability and retreated before her power, been illuminated by her insights and charmed by her foolishness, until she has made us laugh as we have never laughed, made us weep in misery. The domain of the passions, surging in anxiety and exhilaration, is, Georges Bataille says, laughter, tears, poetry, tragedy and comedy, play, dance, music, ecstasy, the magic of childhood, the funereal horror, eroticism (individual or not, spiritual or sensual, corrupt, cerebral or violent, or delicate), the divine and the diabolical, the sacred of which sacrifice is the most intense aspect, intoxication, combat, crime, cruelty, disgust. This domain outside of utilitarian existence Bataille calls “the festive.”10 In designating the multiplicity of impassioned experiences “the festive,” Bataille indicates that the impassioned self is not isolated, closed in itself. We laugh and we weep with others. Before the collapse of laborious projects or pompous behavior or the disintegration of a sententious discourse into nonsense we laugh, we look at one another and are indubitably aware of what each sees and the pleasure each knows in peals of laughter; we are transparent to one another. In tragic and comic art our passions surge together; in dance and carnival our anxiety and exhilaration like crests of

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waves spread among us; in erotic passion each is excited by the excitement of the other. Juan and Miguel descended Cerro Aconcagua and returned to Buenos Aires. Then what? They had known the anxiety and the exhilaration of transgressing the boundaries set by nature and society. These are not experiences that reveal the meaning of life and of the world; they encounter the inhuman, the destructive, the indifference in the substance of reality. Will Miguel driven brutally from Cerro Aconcagua find himself bent on returning? Perhaps he will remember the climb as a time in which he dared and risked as never before and in the pain and exhaustion found he had resources to endure that he did not know he had. Will he find himself attached to remote and forbidding landscapes, going back to the Andes, going to the Sahara, to the ice continent of Antarctica? Will he deepen his passionate attachment in reading books, viewing documentaries, himself speaking, writing, creating? Will he become an environmental activist? Or perhaps he finds in his carpeted office other mountains to climb. Perhaps he will rethink his real estate business, learn new computer technology to make it more efficient, train new employees. Perhaps his days, his weekends will be filled with things that have to be done, things that have to be said. Perhaps the press of things that have to be done and said will take the place of the meaning he had once sought. Three times now Juan has gone to Aconcagua and turned back before reaching the summit. Which of his next patients— banker, middle- aged housewife, college student— is going to hear the advice to climb Aconcagua with him?

Seduction

In a canoe on a lake at night, we hum, we sing softly, picking up the rhythm of the waves and ripples of the lake, the trills of the frogs and cicadas. The rhythm, the cadences go on by themselves; they do not issue out of initiatives on our part. The rhythms of nature captivate us and reverberate in our voice, activate our voices, making them resound. To speak is to take an initiative, to have intentions. We formulate words in order to refer to situations and events. In listening, we attend to the stream of sound breaking into word units, the conventionally coded sounds that relay us to the meaning, the message, and to the things or events being referred to. We are only marginally aware of the voice— the pitch, timbre, resonances, pacing of the voice. Understanding the meaning of one another’s words is supposed to bring us together, but is it not the words added to our irritations and jostlings with one another that produce contempt, humiliation, subjugation and resentment, enmity and war? The words deviate our animosities from hand- tohand confrontations into ruse and subterfuge, cunning, and deceit. Language was invented by humans, Voltaire remarked, in order to conceal their thoughts. The voice has powers of its own; it makes the words commanding, forbidding, menacing, guiding, inviting, consoling. It is first the voice, not the words, that makes contact. To distinguish the sounds just enough to be relayed to the meaning, to have our attention directed to the things and events referred to, is not to make contact with someone. We hear and obey the instruction on our GPS without making contact with anyone. To our question, the store clerk says, “See where it says ‘Men’s Shoes’? Turn left there for the exit.” The meaning

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of the words is anonymous; it turns our attention, leads us to the distant. We turn from the clerk to the exit. When someone addresses us, his or her voice makes contact with us. Someone greets us: “Hi!” “Hey, Al, how’s it goin’, man?” How extraordinary— our sophisticated philosophies of language do not account for it— that this voice aimed at me touches me, makes contact with me, with everything I can mean by “me.” Even if I refuse to respond, or answer with the voice of the role I have assumed— answer as the professor, the father, the busy citizen— I know inwardly that this voice has penetrated through my role, my garb, to make contact with me. Now we hear the tone of that voice— the pitch, the volume, the pacing. Our voice spontaneously picks up the tone, responds with that tone. In our conversations, the excitement or the serenity, the fatigue or the vitality in the other’s tone of voice invades us and animates us. A student bursts into our office and addresses us, “Excuse me, do you have a minute?” in a frazzled, twitchy tone of voice. If we slowly look up from our papers and answer, “Yes, what is it?” in an officious, measured and flat voice, before we refuse what she has to say, we refuse her. The one who greets us is in the tone; her position, her stance, her implantation in the stable or quaking world are there in her voice. Her confusion, her anxiety are in the pitch, accent, syncopation of her voice. Her vulnerability, her exposedness are in the timbre, resonance, overtones of her voice. Her vitality, her nervousness, fatigue, pain are in the lilt, volubility, intonations, pacing of her voice. Her singular inner life, her wellspring of energies and drives and aspirations are in the tone of her voice. Her life makes contact with us, penetrates us, animates our voice. Her life quickens our own. The contact begins things together. A task. We recognize a guy we chatted briefly with in a bar pushing at his car stuck in the snow; he yells: “Hey buddy! Give us a hand!” An escapade. They yell, “Come on!” as they race to the cliff to jump to the icy river below. An entertainment. Riding by our place on her bike on a sunny Saturday morning, she calls, “Hey, come on! Get your bike!” An adventure. He is standing in the African street where people are rushing and shouting and he calls, “Hey, hurry down!” to us at our hotel window. Seduction is all about making contact, coming together, abandoning to one another. The voice hums, purrs, laughs, sobs, gasps, sighs, intones softly songs banal and everywhere in the air. The seductive voice also utters words, sometimes words that abruptly condense, articulate, and define a turbulence of confused feelings and thoughts. But most often the words are commonplace, unserious, insignificant, childish. Repetitions, puns, words indiffer-

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ent to truth, without commitment. Words that do not say what they mean, that insinuate transgressions as insignificant, innocent play. Audacious, perverse, deeds and abandonments proposed are disguised in words that, if one wants, really mean nothing at all. Words that disconnect practical concerns, objectives, judgments, intentions, that open a vague, gauzy free space. Words that dissolve into murmurs and laughter. Every traveler has been seduced by a voice whose words he or she hardly understands. It is not the meaning but the specific properties of the voice that make these vocalizations seductive— the timbre, resonance, overtones, intonations, melodic lines, rhythms. Each of us has a personal range of these qualities in our voice. And for each of us, there is a specific tone and cadence that gives its insinuating powers to the seductive voice. The voice is naturally seductive. It quite artlessly finds tenderness, affection, and lust in its tone and breath. School administrators, insurance adjusters, police willfully strip the sensuality out of their voice, leaving it dry and distant. Their words march in step like soldiers in uniform. The intonations, resonances, consonances of the seductive voice are not directional but rhythmic and repetitive. This voice caresses our contours and surfaces. We feel someone’s resonant breath not in our inner ears but across our face, spreading down our hands, our abdomen, our loins. The voice, its tones and cadences, like caresses, arouses random eddies of pleasure and torment. The seductive voice is all approach, closeness, intimacy. It is low pitched and secretive, soliciting attention. It closes off the boisterousness of the others; it vocalizes to muffle the rumble of the world. The seducer and the seduced are bent over like conspirators, not conspiring against others, conspiring to exclude the others. To a bystander, the vacuity of the seductive voice, its commonplace words and facile phrases sound ridiculous. When the voice of the seducer is overheard, its passion sours into embarrassment and anger toward the others who listen in. The seductive voice becomes husky, dissonant with sighs, coughs, laughter, and tears breaking in it, churned by the breath of a body heated and agitated. It continues of its own momentum, its rhythms, its cadences spreading, circling, ensnaring the seducer, like a song that absorbs the singer. The seductive voice is not a free- floating vocalization; the seductive body approaches in it. It is localized on the moist and trembling lips, comes to us in the channel opened by the eyes gazing upon us, the nostrils visibly draw in the breath it resonates. It dissolves the opposition between the inner body and the outer surfaces that conceal its workings. In the seductive voice and

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the seductive face that approaches in it the whole substance of the seducer is present for us. A face without voice remains at a distance. The most beautiful, most carnal face that does not murmur withdraws into a spectacle, leaving our longing expiring in the transparent but barrier space between us. Bank clerks, high school teachers standing before a room of adolescents heated with hormones, CEOs who strip the sensuality out of their voice, separate their voices from their faces. Their voices are just in the air and become the geometry lesson, geometry audio, the bank regulations, the company policy. The voice of geometry disconnected from the sagging face and jowls of the teacher, the voice of law resounding in the air disconnected from the bony face of the CEO with twitching nose. The voice without the face does not caress us, embrace us. In Kobo Abe’s novel, and the film Hiroshi Teshigahara composed with Kobo Abe, The Face of Another, a chemical researcher suffers an explosion in his laboratory; his face is destroyed. He was wearing goggles, so his eyes are undamaged, but his face is now covered with hard keloids, so that he can no longer smile, frown, raise his eyebrows, fill his cheeks. His face as a sensitive and susceptible substance is congealed into a spread of immobile hardness. His superiors affirm that his job is secure; his work is appreciated as before. At home, his wife is as faithful as before, devoting herself intelligently and attentively to his convalescence. But when, in an upsurge of lustful passion, he attempts to approach and embrace her sexually, she cannot respond. For the one who approaches us sexually is not the genitals; the mouth, the tongue, the eyes, the cheeks, the chin, the breath, the voice are integral to the sexual body, and we are not aroused by someone without a face. In the first third of the film, he occupies the screen most of the time, his head wrapped in bandages, leaving only slits for his eyes, nostrils, and mouth, speaking all the time— and we find the idea of taking such a one to bed inconceivable, repellant. Seduction emerges in a vortex of sincerity, of authenticity. The whole matter of authenticity has vanished from contemporary philosophy, for which the decentered, vacated subject speaks texts whose meaning is not in some subjective intention but in a convergence of other texts. And indeed in most interchanges of talk, sincerity and authenticity are irrelevant and ignored. It really does not matter if the clerk in the store is speaking with her own voice, if she sincerely believes what she is saying about the bargains and the preferred customer cards; of course our neighbor says that he likes the furniture we bought and that our baby is beautiful. In the course of the day it really does not matter if most of the things people say to us are sincere or not, if they personally really believe what they say.

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But sincerity, authenticity, are at stake in seduction. The seductive voice ends in seduction, which is not a relay toward, or symbol of anything further. Seduction is sincere, like hunger and thirst are sincere. The seductive voice comes with a singular face and impassioned body localized here, in this volume, these surfaces and contours, these eyes, these soft lips, this hair, these wrinkles and moles, this breath, this smell. Nothing is so one’s own as one’s seductive voice. To be sure, the seductive voice may begin with phrases and tones picked up from literature or cinema. But when we begin to be captivated, our voice picks up the other’s tone, cadences, silences, and the other ours; the words, the gaze answer one another, the seducer ceases to be a personage from literature or cinema to spiral in our voice, and we hear a voice never heard before in a carnal body like no other. The voice seduces, to erotic display and play, and to orgasm. Eroticism is both pure artifice— body piercings and body painting, filmy and impractical garb, willowy and stomping dances, teasing, wit— and natural. From the most ancient times humans have borrowed the fantasies of other species, adorning themselves with plumes, furs, and shells, parading and dancing impala dances, sage grouse dances, displaying, challenging, teasing. Although our brother apes do not sing, virtually no mammals sing, humans have borrowed the songs of birds, such that with these artificial and profoundly natural vocalizations the seductive voice is rhythmic and melodic. Our sensibility is invaded by the seductive voice, infected with, penetrated by it. Our breath embraces that voice, our arms, our chest, our lips embracing the lips and the breath from which it issues. The postures cave in, thighs and legs lay and roll; hands and fingers shift and sway. The lips loosen, the mouth’s moist spreads upon them; they bungle the train of sentences; our throats exhale gabble, giggling, sighs, moans. Spasms of pleasure and torment radiate from one to another across cheeks, bellies, thighs, loins. Prairie grasses whisper, scattered among them small flowers give their perfumes, trees spread their sheltering leaves, birds dance in the sky, soft clouds gather. The waves carry the voices of cicadas and frogs across the lake.

Truthfulness

Joy is the feeling of excess energies surging, is exhilaration. Joy is the body affirming itself, saying Yes to itself, overflowing. Joy is astonishment before the unforeseeable, incalculable excesses of reality. Joy is greeting, acknowledging, affirming the marvel and glory of what happens, what is. Joy is the state that opens widest to what happens, what is, what was, what will be. Joy is the most expansive, most comprehensive state, the most truthful state. Skepticism and calculation narrow down the mind, latching on to things to say No to; fear and resentment peer into the future to say No. Joy sees the uncertainties and the risks and says Yes to the determinisms and Yes to the chances that compose the world. It is in a state of joy and exhilaration that we should decide the important things, decide to marry this man or this woman, decide to become a dancer, doctor, or deep-sea diver, decide to go live in Paris or Patagonia.

PA R T I V

Belief

We have given things a new color; we go on painting them continually. But what do all our efforts to date avail when we hold them against the colored splendor of that old master— ancient humanity? — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The Stone Axe

Near Yogyakarta in Java a farmer I had come to know gave me a stone axe as old as the Java man. I marveled over the precise binding of rattan that held the blade to the handle and over the so painstakingly sought- out jasper-blue stone of the blade whose form was perfectly symmetrical and whose surfaces were polished like the facets of a jewel. There is not a chip on the sharp edges of the blade: this axe had never been used. It had been a ceremonial axe, made for a gift to the spirits of forest and earth. Touching the wood handle and rattan binding, I discovered they had the grain and the strands, but no longer the substance, of wood and rattan: the stone axe was petrified. Minerals have stealthily and so exactly replaced the substance of the wood and the rattan while retaining all their form and grain. Drawn from the earth and forest and shaped by hands at the dawn of human time, the earth and forest had covered it over and made it yet more enchanted. As much as I marveled over the work of an aboriginal artisan, I marveled yet more over the occult powers of the rock strata that had reclaimed and transfigured it. How solid an object it is, closed in itself, holding its form and its colors while the earth churned about it for thousands of years! But it also holds on to its time and place that it nowise reveals. An abyss opens about it, where a world long ago decomposed. It is an axe, with strong blade bound firmly to the handle, but it was withdrawn from usage. A cult object, a sacred object, that belonged to a sacred personage. I know, can know nothing of the processions and the rites in which this stone axe figured, can recover no afterimage of the titanic or demonic figures that appeared in the visions and trances of that religion. Did spirits take possession of those men and women, occupying all the channels of their bodies, as the earth took possession of this wood, occupying all its cells?

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Separated irrevocably from its sacred usage, it is also separated from profane usage. I do not use it to chop anything, and I have no idea what rites to compose for it. It lies on a low table, the enigmatic center of my house now, about which friends and strangers come, and we speak of its mystery. Innumerable once sacred sites are in ruins. Temples of defeated peoples, of destroyed religions and cultures. They nowise give an impression of eternity; to the contrary, we see on them the decomposition worked even on the hardest stone by tropical rains, jungle, mosses, and lichens. They are sinking back into the rock strata from which they rose. The people who built them are long gone and forgotten; they left no traces of their names or images anywhere on them. They are traces of visions and ecstasies long vanished in the darkness of the past. About them opens the abyss of the inassimilable, the inaccessible, the irrecoverable, the sacred. Terrestrial depths that hold us in thrall and trouble the significance of the ambitions of work and reason.

Angels with Guns

In the house a linen tablecloth our great-grandmother wove and gave our grandmother when she left Lithuania for Scotland, a fossilized fish we as a child found in the woods. In the garden a very old birch tree with curling strips of paperwhite bark, a little patch of wild trilliums that appeared by themselves one spring years ago. Along the road a disused brick water tower of Florentine design, a crumbling three-arched bridge over a deep ravine. In the black of night, a silver cloud drifting across the moon, the flare and disappearance of a meteor. In our house, in our garden, along the road, things arouse, beguile, enthrall, lure, inspire, guide, order, oppress, repel us. They are visible, audible, tangible as we are, but much of their substance and of their force is not visible. There are things that have imperative force concentrated in them: sacred places, altars, tombs, temples; ritual objects such as vestments, censers, trumpets, drums, prayer beads; fetishes and idols, amulets and talismans. Sometimes this exceptional power first became known by the circumstances in which things were found. The image of Our Lady of Belen, now enshrined in Qosqo, was found floating on the sea by the Peruvian coast. The crucifix later known as El Señor de los Temblores was found intact in the debris of a shipwreck. During the Qosqo earthquake of 1650, the images were being taken out of the threatened cathedral; when this crucifix was brought out into the street, the tremors ceased. In Hindu cosmology the Heavenly Ganges (our Milky Way galaxy) descends in the Himalayas, becoming the earthly Ganges, which flows into the ocean and the underworld to continue in the remote heavens. In Pashupatinath, the oldest (constructed 400 BCE) Hindu temple in Nepal, a sadhu gave me a black stone ground by the river in the shape of a lingam. He had accidentally dropped it, and it had cracked

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open, revealing inside the fossilized spiral of a mollusk shell— depicting too the spiral galaxy of the celestial Ganges. We acknowledge and respect the power of these matrix things, we also are wary of it and fear it, seek to protect ourselves from it or deny it. In the fourteenth century BCE, Pharaoh Ahkenaten set up Aten, the sun disc, as supreme and sent royal officials to chisel out and destroy the images and names of Amun and other deities on temple walls and tombs. The Israelites denounced the ritual power objects of the people they conquered as empowered by malignant spirits, demons, or as “false gods,” that is, objects to which powers are falsely attributed. A strong tradition in the dominant religions of the West rejects the idea of sacred art. Drawing from the Jewish and Christian Bible and the Quran, it decrees that the sole access to the sacred is the word— the audibleconceptual and not the visible and tangible. The kingdom of God is not of this world; the sacred is utterly transcendent, outside of this world. This conception gave rise to the Byzantine iconoclasts of the eighth and ninth centuries and the destruction of statues and paintings in the Protestant Reformation. Those who saw sacred presence and power in paintings and statues were abominated as idolaters, worshipping material things instead of the immaterial, spiritual God. We can, with art historians and museum curators, designate paintings and sculptures “religious” simply by reason of their subject matter. Before the multiplicity of religious paintings and sculptures in our museums, we no longer give credence to mythic narratives they depict. We can appreciate them as art for the excellence of their design, materials, and workmanship. Yet some of them possess uncanny power to captivate us and guide us.

The Archangel In a small shop in Qosqo in Peru I found the painting of Saint Michael the archangel. In the book of Revelation Michael and his angels fought in heaven against the dragon.1 Saint Thomas Aquinas explained that angels are immaterial, are pure forms without matter. In European art angels are ordinarily depicted as having only head and wings or head, wings, and hands. However, Saint Michael, depicted defeating the dragon, was most often represented fully armed with the helmet, sword, and shield of a Byzantine warrior or of a western European knight. Here he is clad in shirt with billowing white sleeves and lace cuffs, tight breeches, a brocaded velvet cape with lace ruff, a long cloak, and a cavalier

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hat— the garb of a Spanish grandee, although the plumes of his hat, set upright, are carried over from the headdress of Inca administrators. Carrying a harquebus and a bag of gunpowder,2 he is an armed watchman. The space about him, smoky red, contains no building or landscape of our world; he is striding in ethereal space. The colors of his garb— moss green, aquamarine, ochre, clay red, and rose— welcome one another. These earth colors materialize him in our world and in nature. His face and hair are those of a young androgynous aristocrat. Though armed, there is no ferocity in his face but instead serene watchfulness. His small lips are subtle and sensitive. His huge eyes with dilated pupils dominate his face, making us recall the all-seeing eyes of the Pantocrator that from the fourth century onward was set in the central dome of Eastern Orthodox churches. Our gaze encounters and is engulfed in his eyes seeing us more intensely. His watch protects us but also summons us to be watchful. The image moves with graceful dynamism. The figure is in twisted perspective, the upper body in frontal position, the lower body and the wings in profile. The archangel’s wings are aligned with his legs, plowing the air with his lithe steps. His cloak does not trail behind him but unfolds ahead with his stride. His hands are outspread as in the pose of a dancer. But the archangel’s delicate hands hold the harquebus and the bag of gunpowder in ways no one who knew guns would carry them. Indeed both of his hands are left hands. The painter would be a native in Spanish Peru who had never handled such weapons. This painting was made in or around Qosqo in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. I guess seventeenth century, because paintings of the faces of the angels became more realistic and their garb much more ornamented in the eighteenth century. It may have come from a monastery or more likely from a pious private home, perhaps of an aristocratic family. The image captivates with the magnetism of the eyes and face, the dynamism of the posture, and the beauty of its colors and composition. We are also intrigued by the subject: where did representing an archangel armed with a harquebus come from?

The Cuzco School In 1537 the great Inca rebellion was crushed, and Qosqo was in the hands of Pizarro and his conquistadors. The conversion of the local population to Christianity was set forth as an essential mission of Spanish imperialism and its legitimation.3 The priests worked to extirpate the native beliefs, destroying the Inca temples and shrines and prohibiting their ritual practices.4

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Vicente de Valverde, companion of Pizarro, was consecrated bishop in 1538 and impounded native people to build a cathedral, the Iglesia del Triunfo, on the site of the Inca temple Kiswarkancha. The religious orders, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians, arrived and presided over the construction of great churches. But by ordering churches to be built over sacred places that the Inca had marked with temples, the priests in fact maintained the sacredness of those places in the native consciousness. On the supposition that God must have given access to His Truth to all peoples, the Augustinians actively sought out antecedents of Catholic teachings in the native religion, presenting Catholic beliefs and personages as the true form of imperfect or distorted native beliefs. Saint James, who with his brother John were called in the Gospel “sons of thunder,” was identified with Illapa, the Quechua deity of lightning. The sacred powers revered by the Inca— the Apus, grottos, waterfalls, storms, celestial bodies— were anthropomorphized in the Catholic representation, personified in angels and saints. The native people saw the forces and figures of their cosmology under the Catholic images. Artist monks arrived to cover the walls of churches with paintings, a Bible for the illiterate. Monasteries and convents established workshops where native Americans were trained in Spanish crafts, including making religious sculptures and paintings. Spanish and Italian and, later, Flemish paintings were brought from Europe to serve as models, as well as drawings and copies of European paintings. Spanish, mestizos, and also native people learned painting in these workshops. Members of the Inca aristocracy entered the artist guilds and there found upward social mobility in the new colonial order.5 In 1650 an earthquake devastated Qosqo. The following two decades saw the rapid reconstruction of the cathedral, churches, and monasteries, and the training of many painters to replace the destroyed works. Mayors of cities, lawyers, and merchants commissioned paintings for resale. Qosqo became the center of an industry producing paintings that were distributed throughout Spanish America and even exported to Europe. The Quechua painter Diego Quispe Tito (1611–1681) worked in a small village outside Qosqo; he developed an individual style, incorporating local landscapes and decorative birds. He with Chihuantito and Chilli Tupac are taken to have originated the Cusqueña style. In 1688 there was open conflict between Spanish and Creole and the indigenous painters; the latter left Qosqo’s guild of painters and set up independent workshops. A painting of the Last Supper in the Qosqo cathedral by Marcos Zapata Inca shows Jesus instituting the Eucharist with roast guinea pig and chicha.

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Paintings of the Cuzco school6 depict key events of the Bible and contemporary events such as the dedication of churches and religious processions, like the great procession of Corpus Christi replacing the Inti Raymi of the Incas.7 Portraits of Inca rulers were also popular. European monarchs and Inca rulers, Spanish and native persons were depicted in equally elaborate clothing. Thus importance was given to the image of the personage rather than to his or her identity and story. These painters depicted flat hieratic figures, reminiscent of medieval European art. The scene was not laid out in perspective, and space was filled out with images of native flowers and birds. Red, yellow, and earth colors dominated. The textiles, laces, ribbons, embroideries were painted in intricate detail. The painters delineated much gold tracery on the garments, especially on images of the Virgin Mary, scraping the paint to reveal the gilding first put on the canvas. There are three subjects in Cuzco school paintings that are not found in the European religious art that first served as the models. The Virgin Mary was painted full face on top of a stiff conical robe that is heavily embroidered and bejeweled. The rigid conical dress suggests a mountain; the Virgin appears as the consecrated life that animates the Apus, mountain peaks sacred to the people. The figure of the Virgin Mary, impregnated by the supreme God, substituted for the major Andean figure of Pachamama, the earth-mother goddess who is impregnated by the sun god. The Holy Trinity was represented as three identical men. This form of representation of the three persons in God occurred, though rarely, in Eastern Orthodox art, referring to the three men in the book of Genesis who visit Abraham and whom the text identifies as “the Lord.”8 Papal edicts in 1623 and 1745 condemned representation of the Trinity as three equal men, and in 1628 Pope Urban VIII condemned images depicting the Trinity as a man with three mouths, three noses, and four eyes, but such images continued to be made in Qosqo. Then there are the ángeles arcabuceros, angels with harquebuses. Beginning around 1680, Cuzco school artists painted series of portraits of angels. A complete series would contain an angel standard-bearer, a trumpeter, a drummer, and some angels bearing swords, lances, and shields, or guns. The series would typically include the archangels Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel and continue with the sometimes named Uriel, Adriel, Osiel, El Alami, Habriel, Leriel, Laciet, and Zabriel. Their sumptuous garb sets the archangels apart from the profane realm of work and reason.9 The archangels are depicted as androgynous youths. Francisco Pacheco, painter and official censor for Seville’s Inquisition, had decreed that angels

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must be depicted as neither male nor female and that the models for them should be young men between fifteen and twenty years of age.10 The archangelical androgyny was not an alien phenomenon in Peru. Anthropologist Carolyn Dean found that in the precolonial Andes masculinity was not simply identified with biological maleness but was defined by practices. In infancy there is not yet and in old age there is no longer gender differentiation; “Humans appeared to move from androgyny to single sex, and back to androgyny.”11 Wiraqocha, the pre-Inca and Inca creative center, is an unsexed or androgynous figure.12 In the Andes, people gazed not only at the visible objects in the night sky but the spaces between them, finding not only star-to-star constellations, but “dark cloud” constellations also. The dark cloud constellations formed animals and earthly creatures; these figures were androgynous or asexual.13 In Catholic tradition the angels moved the stars; adoration of the angels was to replace the pagan adoration of the stars.

Sacred Objects Buddha images are not portraits of Siddha¯rtha Gautama; neither male nor female, they do not depict self-conscious individuality, they disconnect egoism. They are images of the body and mind in equilibrium, images of mindfulness and compassion. They are created in a state of meditation and created to induce and sustain meditation. Meditation before a Buddha image induces composure and attentiveness. There are temples and caves where hundreds or thousands of Buddha images all alike have been created, repeated as visual mantras.14 Mandalas are diagrams of concentric circles and squares that from ancient times were made by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists, painted on walls, canvas, or paper. They constitute the floor plans of temples such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur stupa in Java. They are ordered representations of the universe and simultaneously of one’s inner life. They may be complex, containing hundreds of intricate figures. In traversing the concentric circles and squares of the orders of reality the meditating one experiences an inner centering and integration. They are contemplated until the image becomes fully internalized. In Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism mandalas are made of colored sand, millions of grains put in place from tiny tubes. They can be extremely detailed and intricate and take weeks to make. Then they are dismantled and the sand taken to a river. Georges Bataille found that mystical experience is unleashed by the apparition of an object that fascinates and absorbs the viewer. Forms emerging

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and dissolving in the fog have no necessary or meaningful connection with a complex of other objects or with one’s own nature and goals. A cascade is not an image or symbol of perfection or the divine. It captivates by its improbability, its impracticability, its multiple and conflicting facets. A tree struck by lightning opens unto a realm not open to work and uncomprehended by reason, a zone of the unmanipulable, the unusable, a realm of darkness and emptiness.15 It is not a luminous heaven of celestial explanations but a realm of silence. An ecstatic object is like oneself in that it is disconnected from significance and function in the network of pragmatic or significant relationships; it exists in and for itself. But it is undergoing a dramatic loss of its identity, multiplied in caricatures of itself, rent, in flames.16 The ecstatic fixation on such an object becomes an overwhelming desire to join that object, merge with it, lose oneself in it. By chance, I came upon the painting of the archangel Saint Michel in a shop in Qosqo seventeen years ago. It opens back into time, when a Quechua painter worked in a society that understood itself with overlaying myths. He found this lithe and watchful presence in the depth of the perceived nature and institutions about him. He is someone whose sensibility I share; though I do not know his name, he is my brother. In my home the discrete beauty of its colors, the composed dynamism of the figure, the space devoid of irrelevancies emanate a quiet power and directive force. Over the years I have come to know in the painting of the archangel Saint Michel an uncanny power to make one watch with him, walk with him.

Belief

Believing Statements Belief can be understood as a mental act, an individual mind taking specific propositions to be true. But this very general notion of belief has to be limited. Like fish, birds, foxes, and the other primates, we take the world, its objects, and its processes to exist independently of our minds and as being what they show themselves to be to our perception.1 Seeing is not judging what we see to be credible; it is taking what we see to be real. We do not believe that we have hands and legs; we see that we do, and no real doubt arises about that. Scientific practice inserts a deliberate, even contrived, doubt before everything it subjects to observation. Every observation statement has to be verified by a representative number of observations made with standardized instruments and repeated a significant number of times. The reasoning that connects observation statements and derives from them general laws, connects the laws, and derives from them theories has to be shown to be valid according to the laws of logic and mathematics. The mental act that accepts a scientific statement should not be called a belief; it is a mental insight acknowledging verification. We do not believe that the sum of the three interior angles of a triangle equals two right angles; we see that the geometric proof establishes that they do. Belief in a narrow and significant sense would be the mental act committing itself to take as true propositions that are empirically or logically unverified or unverifiable. To believe something is for the mind to take what is unknown as though it were known. Belief, then, looks like a suspect mental act. Is there any real difference between belief and taking as settled what is only speculation or wishful thinking? Is belief, then, a mental act that

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is destined to be disallowed as scientific methods expand knowledge and determine ever more precisely the limits of what we know? Affirming a statement’s truth or probability involves a mental act of surveying its empirical evidence and a mental event of insight into the validity of the argument put forth for it. Believing an empirically or logically unverified or unverifiable statement also involves more than just looking at that statement. What else does it involve?

The Contractual and Practical Nature of Belief Michel de Certeau, philosopher, sociologist, and psychoanalyst, envisions belief as a social act, a sort of contract, that has practical effects.2 In a commercial exchange, the seller gives something with the expectation of getting back the equivalent, after a shorter or longer time interval. He trusts the buyer. Trust is taking what is not known of someone as though it were known. The seller is aware that the buyer may be deceiving or duping him, that the buyer may be concealing his intentions, aware that he does not know the buyer’s mind. He believes that the buyer will make good on his word because he senses that the buyer has a moral character, or he sees that he is the son of a respected and honorable family in the community, or that the buyer respects and obeys the police. Belief involves trust in another person, which may be based on trust in several or many other persons. Since belief is a sort of contract, it has practical consequences. If a trader first sizes up the purchaser and declares that she believes that he is an honest person but does not hand over the goods, we will think that she does not really believe that the buyer is honest. Certeau goes on to argue that there is something of this contract structure in speaking to others. He takes statements as speech acts, utterances that someone addresses to an interlocutor. The exchanges occur over time and involve trust that the other will give us the equivalent of what we give him and, further, that there are practical consequences. Coming upon someone on the mountain trek who looks exhausted, I say to her, “I remember from a year ago that there is a spring about a half mile ahead.” For me to believe what I said is to believe that she will find it and confirm what I said. If I am alone and say to myself, “I remember from a year ago that there is a spring about a half mile ahead,” for me to trust my memory is to trust that others can confirm the existence of that spring and affirm it to me. If a person says he believes in the god of the Jewish Bible or in Jupiter but does not await from others any confirmation and that assertion has no effect

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on his actions, then it is not really a belief; it is a statement he entertains and imagines might be true. Some Questions Certeau argues that belief is contractual. But aren’t there forms of belief that isolate one from others, eventually from all others? Isn’t there a distinctive and fundamental kind of belief that is belief in oneself? One day this young man recognized that he is a dancer, that it is on the dance floor that he belongs, that his body, his nervous circuitry, his circadian rhythms belong. A dancer is not simply someone who skillfully makes the movements of traditional dances or those devised by a choreographer; he is someone who dances his own dance, dances with all his sensibility, his sensitivity, his singular musculature, his blissful and agonizing memories, his aspirations and heartbreaks. This young man is not yet a dancer, but unless he believes that a dancer is what he is, is his nature, he will never become a dancer. Belief in oneself is not belief in some judgments about oneself. Dance is not something he or humans invented; dance exists, has existed from the beginning of the human species: antelopes dance, cranes dance, birds of paradise dance, butterflies dance, the coral fish dance in the sun-splashed oceans. This young man experiences dance taking possession of him, turning smoldering and small longings, sorrows, passions, exultations in himself into dance. Belief in himself consists in adherence to the powers felt in that experience. This belief is not produced by the confidence others have in him and does not require their confirmation; it is a belief that is individual and individualizing.

Religious Belief The distinctive core of religion, anthropologist Clifford Geertz says, is belief in a sacred realm that is really real, real in some different sense and different way from the way the commonsense world is real.3 What makes people turn to this cosmic realm, Geertz says, are harrowing perplexities that confound commonsense understanding and threaten their ability to orient themselves and act effectively in the world.4 Geertz identifies three such crises. First, there is the inability to explain things such as the ravages of nature, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and plagues; the origin and place of humans in the world; the portentous visions of dreams. The

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inability to understand or explain certain aspects of nature, self, and society with the explanations of common sense, science, or philosophical speculation does make people chronically uneasy. The religious perspective envisions a wider, cosmic order beyond the radius of the commonsense world, where explanations may lie. A second existential crisis concerns suffering and erupts in illness and in mourning those we have lost in death. Geertz rejects the kind of positivist theory espoused by Bronislaw Malinowski, according to which religion is a collection of magical pseudoremedies and assurances that illness will be cured and the dead reborn. “Over its career religion has probably disturbed men as much as it has cheered them,” Geertz points out, “forced them into a head-on, unblinking confrontation of the fact that they are born to trouble. . . . With the possible exception of Christian Science, there are few if any religious traditions . . . in which the proposition that life hurts is not strenuously affirmed.”5 The religious perspective envisions a wider, cosmic reality where physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, and the helpless contemplation of people’s agony is explainable and thus becomes something that has to be and can be endured. It enables the sufferer to grasp the nature of his distress and relate it to the wider world.6 It gives resources for expressing our sentiments, passions, affections, and afflictions— the words but also the tone for lamentation, recollection, and compassion. The third existential crisis is the fact that we strive to, have to strive to work out some normative guides to govern our actions, but we see all too often that ethically correct behavior results in disaster, while behavior that we can nowise approve of is rewarded. The religious perspective envisions a wider, cosmic history that accounts for the fallen or corrupt nature of our world that so often thwarts our efforts to live according to sound moral judgments. Geertz says that religious belief is not first and fundamentally belief in certain noncommonsensical and nonscientific propositions; instead it is an adherence to authority. “In tribal religions authority lies in the persuasive power of traditional imagery; in mystical ones in the apodictic force of supersensible experience; in charismatic ones in the hypnotic attraction of an extraordinary personality.”7 Adherence to authority and belief in the cosmic reality and history are, Geertz says, generated by ritual. “It is in ritual . . . that this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated.”8 Rituals make one experience extraordinary forces; in rituals the powers represented in the myths are experienced, Geertz says, as presences.9

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Rituals engender extraordinary moods— the solemnity and grandeur of Monlam, the Great Prayer Festival, at the Barkhor in Lhasa in Tibet; the Ragda-Barong ritual in Bali, which I witnessed one night in the pura dalem, the temple of death, in Kuta, described by Geertz as a confrontation of the grotesque and the malignant, in which people of both sexes fall into trance and rush out to stab themselves, wrestle with one another, devour live chicks or excrement, wallow convulsively in the mud, sink into a coma10—“an orgy of futile violence and degradation.”11 The rituals articulate and give expression to grief and mourning, to triumph, to expectation and hope. Rituals articulate longings into motivations for certain kinds of action outside of the rituals. Plains Indian rituals that stage flamboyant courage set forth motivations to fast in the wilderness, to conduct solitary raids on enemy camps, and to thrill to the thought of battle. Manus rituals that dramatize moral circumspection implant in participants tendencies to honor onerous promises, to confess secret sins, and to feel guilty when vague accusations are being formulated in the community. Javanese meditation séances induce inclinations to maintain one’s poise in awkward or frustrating situations and to experience distaste before emotional outbursts.12 Every action posits belief in the factors motivating that action. We see the world as troubled by capricious and malignant foes, or we feel the reality of compassion in specific events and in the general benevolence of nature. We commit ourselves to their reality in our actions. Some Questions The contractual nature of belief as Certeau conceives it is absent here. The participant in ritual does not put forth a statement about absent powers in the expectation that others will confirm their presence; instead he or she experiences the presence of extraordinary powers. How then do we understand the collective character of religious rituals and religious belief? Anthropologists had given a sociological explanation: since the Romantics, anthropologists had especially focused on the function of myths and rituals to consolidate and strengthen a community and its hierarchies. But the myths and rituals also engender heretics, break-off sects, eccentrics, scoffers, charlatans, and profiteers. In fact ritual is not intrinsically collective. In religious cultures of rudimentary societies and those of today, rituals are performed by individuals, and individuals also go individually to shamans whom they take to be in touch with powers. “Traditional religions,” Geertz explains, “consist of a multitude of very concretely defined and only loosely ordered sacred en-

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tities, an untidy collection of fussy ritual acts and vivid animistic images which are able to involve themselves in an independent, segmental, and immediate manner with almost any sort of actual event. . . . They attack them opportunistically as they arise in each particular instance— each death, each crop failure, each untoward natural or social occurrence— employing one or another weapon chosen, on grounds of symbolic appropriateness, from their cluttered arsenal of myth and magic.”13 Rituals are remembered, selected, or contrived on an ad hoc basis. Anthropologists competent in psychoanalysis sought to show how religion and ritual function to satisfy the individual’s cognitive and affective demands for a stable, comprehensible, and coercible world. Claude LéviStrauss did admit that shamanistic healing rituals do heal, sometimes or often, and showed how their basic methods, stripped of mythical cosmology, are in use in our scientific psychoanalysis.14 But the cultural symbols, models, and paradigms that present to individuals a stable, comprehensible, and coercible society and world also engender internal conflicts in individuals and conflicts with those about them. They clash with the temperament, compulsions, and ambitions of individuals, or they exclude individuals with certain bodies or heredity from a life integrated in itself and integrated into the community. See the rubbish men in Papuan communities in New Guinea, the dacoits or criminal castes in Aryan India, the homosexuals in Christian societies. Geertz speaks of performers in the Ranga-Barong ritual in Bali becoming permanently deranged by the experience.15 And individuals resist, neutralize, protect themselves from the visions and forces of collective cultural performances. In fact religious belief is accompanied by unbelief, even in the same individual. Geertz notes that there are individuals for whom the cosmic forces are vivid for an hour or so during religious rituals or at times of intense distress but are only intermittent and pale images the rest of the time, and there are individuals solidly rooted in the commonsense world and indifferent to and even skeptical about the religious perspective. Belief in religious authorities is always, has always been, accompanied with suspicion of being swindled. Shamans realize that there was something of a Pascal’s wager when they interpreted the physiological or psychological crisis they suffered as a calling. Every shaman knows others whom he denounces as charlatans. A shaman knows that it is with prestidigitation that he pulls from a sick person the disease in the form of the bloody organ that he had put there. Still he believes that there is such a thing as shamanist power, and even when he confesses that sometimes or always he was faking, he knows other shamans whose power he fears.

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Belief in Religious Statements and Disbelief Certeau’s and Geertz’s conceptions of belief contrast with the concept of religious belief as the intellectual adherence to certain empirically or logically unverified or unverifiable propositions. They show how, since the eighteenth century, this concept has come to prevail and also how this mode of religious belief has lost its credibility. What we recognize as “world religions” did not simply replace but confronted local religions and one another and later were confronted by secular, scientific culture and, Max Weber noted, as a result have undertaken a process of rationalization. Religious thinkers sought to make their body of myths coherent and consistent and harmonize all the affirmations in their cosmic representations. The cosmic representations are considered apart from the rituals, the moods they engender and the actions they motivate. Then, Certeau says, they become so many assertions about beings: There is but one God. The universe was created by God. Humans have spiritual souls. The just will be rewarded, the unjust punished, if not in this world in the next world. The statements are asserted as truths. They no longer arise out of rituals but must first be assented to in order that rituals can be justified and enjoined.16 These assertions put forth as truths have been shaken by the irresolvable conflict of world religions. They have also been shaken by scientific rationalism.

Intellectual, Existential, Ethical Crises But the tormenting perplexities that confound understanding and threaten the ability of people to orient themselves and act effectively in the world have not disappeared. They recur, in new forms. Biologists estimate that at least 80 percent of the living species on our planet have not yet been identified. Astrophysicists estimate that 22 percent of the mass of the universe is “dark matter” and 74 percent of its energy is “dark energy,” which they do not possess the instruments to observe. But the progress in observing, identifying, and understanding made in the past century astounds us and implants in us the conviction that the next decades will extend our understanding into microecosystems and macrospaces, into the origin of the universe and its future, into the nature and origin of our organisms and all organisms. Yet there is something incomprehensible about our understanding. We take our organisms to have evolved at a late stage of biological evolution, and we take perception, memory, and understanding to

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serve the survival of species. We do not understand the evolution of a species with a capacity to understand far beyond any biological need, a capacity to understand the whole universe from its origins. And we are dumbfounded by its incomprehensible, unendurable destiny to be destroyed in the final explosion and extinction of our sun. We see major advances in medical knowledge for alleviating suffering and curing diseases, in understanding the causes of aging. We no longer endure, no longer know how to endure suffering and death; they appear absurd, brutal, irredeemably tragic. We do not have confidence in our nature to be able to coexist. Nine nations have now stockpiled a total of fifteen thousand nuclear warheads. We see that the advances of our technology have deteriorated the planet’s climate. Our anxiety understands ever more lucidly the urgency of norms for our acts, but we see small and big nations prosper while continuing to act in defiance of moral judgments.

Practices and Beliefs There also exist among us practices outside of common sense, impractical practices that are haunted by the existential dilemmas that recur in our secular, scientific society, our globalized postindustrial society. Today 50 percent of humanity lives in cities; the number of megacities, with populations of over ten million, is expected to double in the next fifteen years. Ever greater numbers of people live in human-made environments with human-made climates; most of their contact with wider reality is replaced by media images. Yet there persists a compulsion to leave human-made environments and go to nature, to environments unmarked, unconceptualized, unmanaged, unused by the human species. Moving with the falling leaves in the fall breezes in the mountains under the drifting or gathering clouds. Moving through the savannah and the forest with the winds, ascending the mountains with the mists, drifting down the rivers. Moving with the herds of wildebeests, zebras, and impalas in the Serengeti. Soaring on a paraglider in the thermals with the vultures. Not swimming, only steering with our fins in the ocean surge with the coral fish. We visit excavations and monitor the millions of years from mosses and liverworts to dinosaurs. We make our way across mountains and continents as the continental plates collide and buckle up these mountains that freeze the west winds and dry out these deserts. We descend into the Colca Canyon and the Quebrada de Humahuaca, treading the eons that deposited these fifty strata of petrified sediment. In the crystal nights of deserts and mountains our gaze travels the light-years of the stars.

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These nomadic departures, like rituals, make us experience the presence of extraordinary forces, in microsystems and macrospace. They give commanding force to trancelike states where we lose sight of our ego gratifications and of our egos, make oblivion seekers hypnotically attractive, give authority to captivating imagery in our literature and media. Wars, plagues, epidemics, pandemics, and droughts and famines in the wake of climate change afflict multitudes of people. Thousands of doctors, nurses, public health specialists, and ordinary people enlist in NGOs, go to refugee camps and to slums to try to limit preventable deaths, cure diseases, and alleviate suffering. They find people in the outer zones who have lived in swampy or rocky terrains, in harsh polar or desert climates, who endure suffering. Orphans in war-ravaged lands who band together and survive. The people who go off to work in NGOs typically experience the ambiguity and failure of their mission. They alleviate suffering, cure some diseases, but have no effect on the wars, pandemics, and climate change that continue to produce more slums, diseases, and refugee camps. In fact their work may function as cover for economic and political forces that push ahead. But they experience the enigmatic ability of people to endure, to know how to endure, suffering, to endure mortality. Our politics has become subservient to the global expansion of markets for mass-produced commodities. Yet people come upon and search for experiences of a different humanity. They wonder at the collective bravery and generosity in the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and technological disasters. People rise with emotions and skills they did not know they had. Everyday concerns and societal strictures vanish. A strange kind of liberation fills the air. Social alienation seems to vanish. The response to disaster gives us a glimpse of who else we ourselves might be and what else our society could become. We also come upon rituals revealing, consecrating, celebrating, a different humanity. Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, where everything— plants, insects, birds, beasts, heroes, knaves— becomes beauty, samba, and alegria. These impractical practices induce extraordinary moods that are revelations. People are overtaken by moods that reveal how we are embedded in the reality of inhuman nature, how nature affects us, weighs on us. Finding ourselves in the midst of people who endure, who enigmatically know how to endure suffering and death, gives rise in us to endurance and to grief and mourning. Participating in collective performances gives us over to collective beauty and joy. And these practices, these rituals articulate moods and longings into motivations for certain kinds of action outside of the ritual. We are motivated

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to act to protect the rain forests, the Andes, the ice continent of Antarctica. We are motivated to give voice to the millions who endure epidemics and famines. We are motivated to resist and combat the conquerors and plunderers of today, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Cortéses and Pizarros of global geopolitics. In these rituals and these motivations and actions, there are beliefs. And belief in oneself arises when one leaves the city to go to nature, when one goes off to work in slums and refugee camps, when one goes to work in the wake of natural or social disasters or to participate in rituals of collective generosity and joy.

Performance

On the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, waiting 168 years for its bronze statue, Antony Gormley puts living bodies. As artworks.1 Something new and not new: to have a human body is to make art and make one’s body an artwork. Archaeologists have found stone tools in Africa, the Middle East, Siberia, and Europe from 1.4 million years ago that they call “bifaces”; the two sides are painstakingly chipped into corresponding convex faces and the edges chipped into arcs— exhibiting beyond utility a drive for aesthetic perfection. On the four-thousand-year-old yoga seals of Mohenjo- daro and Harappa in the Indus valley André Leroi- Gourhan finds the earliest evidence of artistry done on the human body, creating new poised postures, visceral harmony, and harmony of breath with the air.2 The living artworks on the plinth perform. To perform is to design and display actions that do not effect material results but produce effects on others. Evolution becomes culture in performances. Elders perform initiation rites, consecrating a new state of maturation and agency in the social order. In ritual the officiant utters words and intonations and chants to bring about social equilibrium and collective identity. Shamans, in ecstasy or in trance transformed into a god, demon, bear, bird, or tree, perform exorcisms and healings. Weddings and funerals, religious and state rituals and ceremonies, grand opera, theater, multimedia musicals are the summits of our culture. They break with the continuities of everyday practical life and its instrumental language, mark off sacred places, exhibit a higher sphere of existence, and release the deepest emotions. When did it all start? When did humans start displaying themselves to others ostentatiously, with repetitions and exaggerations, with nonproductive, “symbolic” actions? Amotz and Avishag Zahavi observed antelopes, watched their “stotting” or “pronking”: when a gazelle spots a lion crouch-

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ing nearby in the grass, instead of lying still to hide or leaping off, the gazelle turns to face the lion, moves slowly, and repeatedly jumps high in the air. The gazelle is showing off, the Zahavis could only conclude— mocking the lion, showing the predator that she can outrun him.3 In Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and Australia people have seen the complex courtship rituals and dances of the fifteen species of cranes. They have watched males of many species of birds gather in traditional performance areas, where they compete in elaborate rituals (researchers have named these gatherings “leks,” Swedish for “play”).4 Sage grouse, manakins, birds of paradise, greater bustards, ruffs, and kakapos perform dances, acrobatics, displays of decorative plumes, songs, and vocalizations. Sometimes hundreds of males gather to perform sometimes for four months, as the females wander among them choosing a partner. One after another twenty-four hundred people were lifted with an industrial forklift to the plinth in Trafalgar Square that had been built for a hero of empire representing himself and Britain. They were not chosen for their feats of valor, their historical impact, or for their artistry; they were chosen by random chance. They take the place of the hero, to be on his level of importance, to join the other three bronzed heroes, to rival them, compete with them, contest their message, their exemplary deeds, their images of Britain. A charge as daunting as the initiation rites of peoples anthropologists reported on in the remote regions of the empire. They enacted rituals from ancient times and far- off lands and rituals they invented. They exhibited symbols of and declaimed political and social causes. They jeered at trends, ideologies, and politicians; they sassed at the felonious and the righteous. They performed feats of skill with style, acrobatics, dancing; they sang and played musical instruments. Costumed, they put on comedy acts. They stripped themselves of rank, status, professional identity, clothing; they exhibited their young or old, elegant or pot-bellied bodies nude. They spun wool, they stood still for an hour, they meditated. To perform is to exhibit oneself for an audience to instruct, direct, admonish and warn, excite, entertain. And to perform is to exhibit oneself, to affirm oneself, celebrate oneself, one’s convictions, one’s ethnic identity, one’s birth or chosen gender, one’s buoyant or insolent youth, or one’s cheeky or impassioned old age. To perform is to script one’s body, to recycle strips and patterns of behavior. To extract an action on implements and with props and restore it in thin air on top of the plinth. To extract the pompous or stumbling gait of a person seen passing in the street, the pouting of a righteous neighbor, or the stentorian voice of a preacher and mount it in one’s body. To extract

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the feline gaze of a temptress, the lumbering of a gorilla or a Godzilla, the bounce of a balloon, and fit it into one’s torso and limbs. When patterns of behavior are taken from one context and played in another, they function differently, mean something different. They are luminous, enhanced, glorified; they are comical, burlesque, parodied. Yet every strip brings some of its former meaning to the new context. The bread and wine transubstantiated into the body and blood of God retains the traits of bread and wine, and on the everyday table the bread and wine become central. The performer on the plinth who makes himself into Lord Nelson or the Angel of the North is also a bloke with his own wit or timidity, polish or stilted posturing. When he descends to his everyday life, he will retain within himself something of the posture invested on him on the height. The performers were filmed and shown on television; their performances were posted on the Internet, where they could be viewed on computer screens. On regular television programs performances by professionals or by “ordinary people” are edited to make them both more dramatic and more palatable and fitted into a “showtime” format. Politicians’ speeches, athletic feats, dramatic plays, fashion shows, consumer goods and kitsch, and snippets from ordinary life by ordinary people from anywhere and everywhere stream across the frenetic screen, becoming equivalent and interchangeable. On the plinth each person affirmed him- or herself, performed for an hour, alone determining how to fill it. They were there not just with their message but with their bodies. To be there, to awaken, to stand upright, to contract a posture is to pass over our bodies, to absorb ourselves in the environment that lies illuminated about us. Our bodies move and act by forgetting themselves. To become conscious of our body parts is to disconnect their movement: to look at our feet is to hobble the dancing; to look at our fingers is to shamble the typing. Performing fills the blank space of the body with itself. On the plinth the body’s stature, bulk, the fluidity or awkwardness of its movements materialized. The body might reel in vertigo at this height; the staff anticipated that by fixing a broad safety net about the plinth. Scheduled for the heat of the day or the cold and rain of the night, the bodies suffered the vulnerability of flesh. In bad weather in the middle of the night when there was no one but the technical staff in the square below, the bodies experienced their primal craving for the physical presence of other bodies. They experienced their performance going flat, exposed to the indifference, boredom, ridicule of the strangers in the square below. Shame as well as pride are not simply grasped mentally, where the resources of the mind can counteract them; they are in the heat that flushes the body, the agitation of

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the stomach, the weakness of the knees, or in the composure of the posture, the euphoria of breath. On the plinth some knew poundings of exhilaration and rapture. In a theater and in a jazz bar the performers respond to the response of the audience, in the close and closed space being thrilled and energized or discouraged and debilitated by it. Here the distance, the height disengage the performer from the face-to- face interaction with an audience, isolate the body, force it to extend itself, its message in a bottle cast into the ocean. We in the square move to position ourselves; we strain to see and hear, sweating bodies in the heat of the day and shivering in the rain of the night. In a theater we are spectators; we look and understand and empathize with the characters living out a narrative. Here other feelings rise: we are wowed by the originality and audacity of what we see. We are enchanted to see so nondescript an individual become a snow leopard, gazelle, or bird at that height. We feel fear for the performer, fear that he or she may feel the performance is falling flat, that he or she is becoming ridiculous. We feel a fear for ourselves; we sense that we could not do that. The scripted and rehearsed performances of professionals leave our emotions free to respond to the fictive characters they portray. Here these conflicted feelings bind us to the performer, however engaging or slipshod the performance. But since we are not risking what the performer is risking, our security and complacency indulge in impulses to referee, to thumbs down, to acclaim and to heckle, to commend ourselves for not being foolhardy and eccentric. We arrogate to ourselves a right to be instructed, entertained, amused. The performer stands high and sees the four plinths, Nelson’s Column guarded by four lions, the circle of the National Gallery, the Admiralty Arch opening upon the Mall, and the Canada and South Africa Houses. Each performer is lifted out of the radius of his or her life, the constellation of his or her family, friends, workplaces, to see a depth of history and a world theater materialize about them. “I’m interested in how people’s view of the world changes,” Antony Gormley says, “by being that exposed in such a public place.” I am also interested in how people are transformed on the plinth. In this the performer is different from a professional actor. We read about how the professional actor who played Billy Canton, Heinrich Harrar, Tylor Durden, and Benjamin Button was transformed as an actor, but not how he was transformed as a person. To the public who so want to know about the drama in the lives of cinema stars, the media show and tell of their mansions, their lovers, marriages, and divorces, their illnesses, addictions, and recoveries.

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Jane Belo questioned Balinese who in the trance called sanghang snorted and acted like pigs, slid on the ground like snakes, closed catatonically like potatoes. Afterward, they reported to her that in trance they knew the intense low and self-releasing pleasures of being pig, snake, potato.5 The man on the plinth progressively disrobed to reveal his chubby middle-aged body, and then dressed in corset, sleek gown, spike heels and adorned himself with the cosmetics and coiffure of a queen. For the onlookers below it was perhaps another spectacle, but he did it on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, and cross-dressing in the privacy of his bedroom or in a gay bar or only in his imagination will henceforth not be the same. The hours on the plinth of those who performed in the downpour in the middle of the night with the square empty below, or whose performance in the middle of the day left no one in the square paying attention, marked them though it marked no one else. A hitherto unknown depth of feeling, desolation, and exhilaration was implanted in them. We laugh at others, at the breakup of their sentences into nonsense, at the collapse of their manipulations. And we laugh with others; glancing at one another in laughter we are transparent to one another. We do not laugh alone; laughter is a contagion picked up from others. Our common humanity is here not conceived in the recognition of a universal faculty of reason but felt in the transparent pleasure of laughter rebounding among us. The performer on the plinth who finds his declamations echoing into rumble, his acrobatics fumbling, hearing the guffaws of the people below, feeling his body turning into jelly, finds himself laughing at himself. In this he knows in pleasure his humanity and recognizes common humanity. The performer we watch is someone like us, performing strips of behavior from ordinary life but exaggerated, reversed, enhanced, travestied. These enhancings and inflatings make us aware that in everyday life we too are attentive to the flair with which we tell a story or a joke, attentive to the skill, style, and speed with which we work in the office and make a meal for our guests. We become aware of theatricality in our everyday life, aware of roles we are playing skillfully or ironically in making complaints to stores and public officials and even in family scenes. Viewing the person on the plinth as someone we could exchange places with, will we not now find ourselves enhancing, glorifying, making solemn or riotous more strips extracted from the continuities and routines of our life? What one should learn from artists— How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something

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from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture— but even more from artists, who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent— all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end when art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life— first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters. —Friedrich Nietzsche6

Voyage

How present to me today is Anna, whom I met yesterday, forty-eight years ago. That summer when after the school term I hitchhiked to New York. Walking the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I got caught in a sudden downpour and noticed what looked like some kind of shelter opened by some charity. Inside, a musty room, some chairs, a few derelict people. One chair free in the corner. When I sat down, the woman in the adjacent chair turned and murmured, “Hello. It is nice in here.” I murmured, “Yes it is,” but looked down as soon as I glanced at her. She was small, bent over, old. The skin of her face was brown and looked like it hadn’t been washed in months; she had only a few teeth, dark brown, that looked like fangs; her body was covered in several ragged dresses pulled over one another; three discarded nylon stockings were pulled over her hair and head, their heel ends dangling down her back; a rank odor emanated from all that. I did not move; this was the only chair free in the room and it was raining outside. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and then she asked me if I had a cigarette. I fished one out and lit it for her. She murmured, “You are kind. You are a kind man.” Then she murmured on. For a long time. She was recounting a fantastic trip she had taken, from a far-off island, on a ship, then finally to Manhattan. After a while I realized that she had come from Staten Island on the ferry that day. She told of the royal purple of the sky and then the triumphant sun that had risen from the dead and gilded everything in gold; the carriage ride through the landscape where women stood alongside the road and sang operatic arias; the great ship upon which the prince and princess stepped clad in scarlet and silver; the graciousness they beamed to everyone, awakening smiles and gestures of kindness in everyone; the white birds that danced pirouettes in the sky around the ship; the arrival at Manhattan; stepping off the ship into the great cries of trumpets and hautboys. I glanced sideways at

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her as she spoke, and thought that for years, for decades, this woman had slept in alleyways and grubbed half-eaten sandwiches from garbage cans, that everyone who noticed her and caught scent of her turned away, that street kids yelled insults and threw things at her. That on the ferry everybody turned away and kept a distance from her. In her recounting of her day I was astonished to realize that none of that appeared; she lived a medieval magical epic— there was no trace of bitterness, resentment, despair in her. Finally the rain stopped; it was getting dark, and I left. Walking through the crowds that now filled the streets, I was floating, having spent some hours with a mystic poet whose glance filled all who passed with kindness and turned the earth and heavens into golden light.

PA R T V

Justice

I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. — Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”

The Future of Torture

Physical and Psychological Torture What is called physical torture comprises methods of producing severe pain. These include blinding with light, beating, electric shock, flogging, contortion and binding, pulling of fingernails, whipping feet, breaking bones, branding, burning feet, castration, reverse hanging, and waterboarding, used today in at least eighty-one countries. They include punching, kicking, beating with a broom handle and a chair, slamming against walls, jumping on detainees, stomping on body parts, attaching electric wires to fingers, toes, and penis, using military attack dogs to bite, sodomizing detainees with a chemical light and a broom stick, sexually assaulting male and raping female detainees— practices that were found in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, as detailed in the May 2004 Article 15-6 inquiry headed by Major General Antonio Taguba. What is called psychological torture comprises methods to produce exhaustion, fear, anxiety, hopelessness, desperation, psychic disorganization, loss of control of mental states and acts, and extreme dependency. The methods include (usually solitary) confinement in small and darkened spaces, in rooms kept extremely hot or extremely cold; deprivation of food, water, clothes, and sleep; prolonged standing, crouching, or kneeling, and forced physical exertion; temporal disorientation produced by erratic scheduling of meals and interrogations and the disruption of sleep cycles; holding rooms that induce misperceptions or sensory failure, narcosis, and hypnosis; sensory deprivation in the use of blindfolding, hooding, soundproofing masks, nasal masks, and sensory deprivation vaults; sensory assault with bright or stroboscopic lights, loud noise, and shouting; forced nakedness, denial of personal hygiene, forced interaction with vermin, contact with

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blood or excreta; forcing the detainee to witness or carry out masturbation, copulation, or other sexual acts; forcing detainees to witness or engage in blasphemy, defilement, and sacrilege; implanting a sense of helplessness through arbitrary arrest, random punishment, and indefinite detention; threats of physical torture, rendition, and death; mock executions; and forced witnessing of torture. Physical torture reduces the victim, bound or shackled, to powerlessness, and the punchings, beatings, slashings reduce the victim to a mass of impotent and broken flesh and gore, where the conscious life of the victim, his or her power to think and judge and decide is mired in the opaque throbbing of pain. Psychological torture is produced by physical means— arrest, solitary confinement, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, stress positions. Forcing the detainee to stand for hours produces an accumulation of blood and fluids in the legs, painful swelling up to and into the thighs, and eventual kidney malfunction. However, the physical pain is not produced by external blows but by the body of the detainee itself. And psychological torture has physical effects. Among these are gastrointestinal disorders, gastritis, ulcer-like dyspeptic symptoms, regurgitation pains in the epigastrium, spastic colon, rectal lesions, sphincter anomalies, histological lesions, dermatitis, uricaria, tendonitis, chronic rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, gynecological disorders, hearing impairment, collapsed ear canal, visual impairments, arteriosclerosis, and organic brain damage.1 Today neuroimaging studies are beginning to reveal functional or structural brain alterations in victims of physical and also of psychological torture.2

Maintaining the Will with Physical Torture; Destroying the Will with Psychological Torture Physical torture aims to arouse intense fear. Indeed, as the CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual states, fear of pain is most often more unendurable than the pain itself. “Sustained long enough, a strong fear of anything vague or unknown induces regression. On the other hand, materialization of the fear is likely to come as a relief. The subject finds that he can hold out and his resistance is strengthened. If the debility-dependencydread state is unduly prolonged, the subject may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”3 What subsists, in the extremities of torture, is a wrenching of life away from the pain. This shudder of life is something like a raw will, a will to push back from the pain. The torturer wants this terrified will to subsist and to

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act. He waits for the moment when that will in the victim will decide and cry out: “Stop! I will tell you everything!” And in betraying his comrades, his cause, his community, and his convictions, the victim continues to exist as a will, a personal and autonomous will. He or she wills his or her ignominy. Psychological torture is the torture of the future, not only because it is “no marks” torture but also because its aim is different from physical torture and more radical. “The purpose,” according to the opening sentence of the CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual “is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships, or to cope with repeated frustrations.”4 The purpose is to progressively reduce the victim to an infantile state. The methods of solitary confinement and suppression of any means the victim has of acquiring information about his or her family, fellow detainees, or the outside world strip the victim of the sense of bonds with his or her family and community. The sensory deprivation and also the sensory bombardment, the ceaseless pounding of junk music, and sleep deprivation function to disconnect the thought and reasoning capacities of the mind, stripping the mind of the victim of his insights and convictions. The aim is to break down the adult system of inhibitions and internal prohibitions that an individual puts on those acts he or she has come to judge pragmatically, politically, and morally wrong. The torture produces a dissolution of the identity that the individual has constituted for him- or herself, a dissolution of the internal structure by which an individual issues actions out of his or her evaluation of goals and means. The sensory deprivation and also the sensory bombardment disconnect memory and anticipation; the victim is less and less able to remember his or her comrades and even his or her own experiences. The blanked-out future— for example, the indefinite future without hope of release or even of trial and sentence— disconnects the mind’s groping for goals, for objectives, even the mind’s ability to foresee. In these ways the victim is reduced to an infantile state of psychic helplessness. The manipulation of space and time, constantly varying day and night, the time for meals, for the toilet, disconnect the victim not only from the cultural world but also from the rhythms of the natural world. In a memo the CIA summarized its research aim to be “the development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his

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will and without his knowledge,” allowing “control of an individual where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”5 The victim is not simply reduced to impotence, helplessness, but to a state of ever-greater dependency on his or her torturer. The kind, intensity, and duration of pain and the moments of relief and respite depend on the torturer. The smallest details of daily events, the time and duration of rest, the forced wakefulness, the times and quantity of nourishment, the possibility to go to the toilet or urinate— depend on the whim and word of the torturer. The only person the victim can hear or speak with, the only person he or she sees is the interrogator. The efficacy, even the very exercise of will on the part of the victim are abolished. Once reduced to this infantile state, the victim is receptive to suggestion from the torturer, susceptible to taking the torturer as the victim’s companion and friend and receptive to assenting to ideas, judgments, and evaluations that the torturer suggests to the victim. The victim renounces his or her cause and converts to the ideology of the torturer. He or she does not convert intellectually, that is, come to see the evidence for the justice of the state policy; instead he or she falls more and more completely into an affective and cognitive dependency on the torturer.

The Efficacy of Torture There is little published material on the numbers and percentages of torture victims who gave true information. What is well known to torturers is that many, even most victims of physical torture eventually come to say whatever the torturer wants to hear, fabricating false information, to put a stop to the torture. During the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 US POWs cooperated with the North Koreans and Chinese. Of the 3,323 US Army prisoners 39 percent signed propaganda petitions, 22 percent made voice recordings, and 11 percent wrote pro-Communist articles.6 What percentage of victims of psychological torture gave true information? Sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, or sensory bombardment, all of which cut the victim from the coordinates of his family, community, and habitat, produce delusional and hallucinatory states. When reduced to a psychotic infantile state, the victim is in a highly suggestible condition and elaborates detailed information about his or her comrades that the victim him- or herself cannot distinguish from his or her own thoughts and real memories. Thus evaluating the worth of what the

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victims of psychological torture say is yet more difficult than in the case of victims of physical torture.

Marking the Lines Physical torture— inflicting prolonged severe pain on someone disarmed and helpless— strikes us as heinous. Every aggression against a fellow human, every crime that is accompanied with torture is monstrous. When torturers in the employ of the state inflict prolonged pain on disarmed and helpless detainees, the torture is a monstrous use of the power of the state. Psychological torture produces physiological effects. But it aims to produce a state in which the victim will say what the torturer demands, no longer having any judgment or decision that controls his mental actions. It aims to destroy the identity and adult agency of the victim and to reduce the victim to infantilism. It is a more extreme violation of the humanity of the detainee than that produced by physical torture, which aims to produce a state where there is still the individual and his will, who decides to betray his cause and his community out of fear of pain. Psychological torture strikes us with the same repugnance as the torture of an infant. What makes psychological torture appear less repugnant than physical torture is that the methods— sleep deprivation, stress positions, solitary confinement— taken individually do not seem unendurable. It is their combined use that destroys the adult structures of the person. In fact, each of us would judge being beaten, being blinded, even having one or more limbs amputated less horrifying than being systematically reduced to psychotic infantilism. Victims of physical torture by the Gestapo or Pinochet’s police spoke of finding that even as their bodies could endure the extremities of the pain they dreaded going mad. The Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture proclaim the principle that when armed combatants, or civilians, surrender or are captured, they are out of the war and must no longer be treated as enemies. The return to torture has been justified by the concept that the war on terror is an entirely new kind of war, an asymmetrical war where one side has massive military might and the other side has only sabotage, which depends on secrecy. The principal weapon against the so- called terrorists is infiltration of this secrecy, the extraction of information. It is then argued that all combatants who have surrendered or been captured are still in the war, for they possess information. Then there is no detainee who is not scheduled for torture. Indeed, if it is legitimate to torture a detainee to obtain information that may

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save hundreds of lives, is it also defensible to torture his wife, his parents, or his children? In Afghanistan and Iraq many of the individuals who were brought to the detention facility where interrogations were conducted were family members of a “targeted individual,” who, it was hoped, would turn himself in so that his spouse and children would be freed.7 The methods of psychological torture have spread from the Soviet Union to England, France, China, the United States, and Latin America and have become an essential weapon of nations that find themselves threatened by asymmetrical conflict in the twenty-first century. We citizens of these nations have to distinguish between informed and deliberate conversion of a detainee’s political convictions, through a kind of hard bargaining that appeals to the detainee’s rationality, inducing a detainee to betray his or her convictions and his or her community and bringing that about by deceit and deception, and inducing a detainee to betray his or her convictions and his or her community by the deliberate destruction of the detainee’s identity and sanity. We have to formulate the ethical principles that determine such distinctions. We also have to formulate the juridical principles that nations can agree to so as to limit the horrors of psychological torture.

Justice

That summer I was in Java. Back home I had a Moluccan cockatoo who had lost his mate. One day in Jakarta I went to the Pasar Burung. Among the hundreds of stalls of birds in the market, I saw no Moluccan cockatoos. I tried to ask around, but nobody spoke English. Then an old man turned up who spoke English. He explained that the Maluku Islands are far from Java; the market is full of beautiful local birds. He spoke to several merchants, then asked me to wait; someone knew of a couple of people who might be interested in selling their Moluccan cockatoos. An hour later, two men did appear with birds. We studied them: among Moluccan cockatoos only a slight reddish tinge in the eyes of mature females differentiates the sexes. I could not see such a hue in the eyes of either bird but decided to trust the men, who affirmed one was female. I asked about export regulations. The old man explained to me that the bird would require a month’s quarantine, then a certificate of health from a registered veterinarian, then an export permit from the Ministry of Wildlife. As I was due back at my university in three weeks, I asked the old man if he could arrange the permits and ship the bird for me. He assented. I gave him $200 for the owner of the bird, $200 for the estimated shipping costs, and $200 for the quarantine, veterinarian, and export permit costs and for his services. He wrote down a receipt on a piece of paper and signed it. I realized of course that he, knowing I was soon leaving for the other side of the planet, could just keep all the money. But since I could not obtain the bird I needed in the United States for less than $2,000, I indulged in, and enjoyed, trusting him. I did not receive the bird. I was not angry or indeed surprised. I thought that if I were an old man with no assured income and a rich foreigner came ready to spend so much money and leave, I would have done the same. Still I was unhappy to see my male bird alone.

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The following year I decided to spend my summer free time from the university in Irian Jaya. As it happened, to return I had to change planes in Jakarta. I extended my stop for a few days and went to look at the Pasar Burung. As I approached, I was startled to see the old man suddenly in front of me. He greeted me rapidly and said we should go to the police station; it was nearby. It took a moment for me to recognize who he was; I had no expectation of seeing him again in the crowds of the market and had not thought of what I would say if I were to see him. He, apparently wary of violence from me, quickly led the way to the police station. At the station the officer, a lean man in his thirties, virile in the skin-tight shirt and trousers of the Indonesian police uniform, came from behind his desk and invited me to sit down, pulling up a chair also for himself. The old man seated himself near us. The officer addressed a subordinate, who brought a plate of pastries and cups and a few minutes later poured tea for us. The officer remarked on the heat of the day, asked my country, how long I was visiting Indonesia, said he had never been to Irian Jaya, assured himself that I had not caught malaria. He asked how long I was traveling. I explained that I was a teacher and had always taken the summer to travel to another country. He asked my impressions of Indonesia, what places I had seen, suggested a few other fine places to visit. I was honest in telling him Indonesia was one of the countries I liked best, its wonderful landscapes, the great variety in its 18,307 islands, my admiration for the multiple cultures and ways of life. I was not surprised by this small talk, knowing that in Indonesia one never bluntly states one’s business right off, even to an official who could be considered to have important things to attend to. After a while one, then another policeman joined us, tasting the pastry, drinking tea, practicing their rudimentary English, I joining in asking the Indonesian words for things. To cover lapses in the conversation I asked each policeman who joined us where his home was, how long he had been stationed in Jakarta, asked about his family back home. Hours passed. I was enjoying speaking with these courteous men, so unlike the demeanor of police back home (my main contact with police had been when I drove a taxicab in Chicago and two or three times a week had been accused by a traffic policemen of some nonexistent violation for which it was routine to settle the matter on the spot with a couple of twenties). It was now about midday and I wondered how to bring up the matter at hand. I began speaking of my home and mentioned the solitary Moluccan cockatoo. The officer asked about my interest in birds, how long I had kept birds. Then in a few sentences I recounted my transaction with the old man. The officer then spoke to the old man, in Indonesian, quietly and, it

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seemed, courteously. He then turned to me, looked at his watch, and asked if I would like to join him and his men for lunch. I was by now wondering if I would end up spending the day in Jakarta with these men and thinking we had about run out of topics of small talk; I apologized and said I had to meet a friend in an hour. More tea was poured, and the officer eventually asked me what I would like him to do. Thinking we were finally speaking of the language of law and police, I told him that I had given this man $600, and he should now either ship me the bird as he had agreed or return the money. To the officer’s question, I said that I had no desire to press charges against the old man or harm him. But I still needed a female for my bird, and Moluccan cockatoos are very hard to come by in my country. The officer asked if I would like the old man to now locate a bird for me. I said, “To be sure.” “Would you be able to give him the money to purchase it and to pay the costs for the papers and shipping?” “Yes,” I said, and with a look at the old man said we would consider the whole matter closed. We finished our tea, rose, and I shook hands with the old man and thanked the officer. He asked if I could return at nine the day after tomorrow. I left, thinking that I liked this police officer. I liked how gracious he had been with me and also with the old man and with his staff. How different it would be in my country: there the police display their efficiency; I would have stated my complaint, having rehearsed beforehand to state it clearly and succinctly. What alone would be relevant would be the law and the contract made with the old man, who would be questioned and his signature on the receipt verified. He would be required to make good on the contract, and if he could not return the money would be liable to punishment. I understood that the Indonesian officer was not simply whiling away the morning in small talk. He knew that I was rich relative to his people; he came to know that I was rich enough to travel every summer, rich enough to spend $600— a half year’s salary for an Indonesian policeman— on an exotic bird. He came to understand that I was genuinely interested in and captivated by the foreign lands I visited. He understood that a Moluccan cockatoo would not only be a mate for my male but a continuing affective bond with Indonesia. He also realized that the old man could not supply the bird, for he did not have one, had no shop, had no income save for the services he, with his knowledge of English, could give occasional foreigners. The old man had of course long ago spent the $600 for his needs and those of his family. The one thing the old man could do, and which I could not do, was locate someone in the city who had a female Moluccan cockatoo he might sell. Among us justice is realized if the wrongdoer is punished whether or not

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he assents to the punishment and is diminished not only in his property or his life but also in the clarity of his heart. And for us justice is realized if the one wronged is restituted or revenged. If forgiveness heals his sense of wrong having been done to him, the law takes no account of his forgiveness; resolution of conflicts does not mean reconciliation of the parties. I began to understand that for the police officer justice was not realized by setting up a rational system of laws to regulate transactions between individuals, and his task was not simply to enforce those laws. Society is just— is realized as a society— when a dispute between individuals is resolved, when both parties agree that the solution is just. If one party is punished and his life or honor blighted, his bitterness will remain in the community. The police officer came to understood that what was important in my life was not the $600 that I had to spend in one way or another, an exotic bird or some other luxury; it was the enrichment I acquired by coming to know and appreciate other lands and cultures. He understood that I would hardly remember well my summer if I had brought charges against or humiliated an impoverished old man. He also understood that saving face is important to an old man in his community; he had given the old man the opportunity to redeem his good name. And the old man would recognize that the foreigner had been gracious and would think well of him and be inclined henceforth to treat foreigners as fellow members of his broader community. Two days later I returned to the police station at nine in the morning. The police officer greeted me warmly, pastries were set, tea was poured, there was conversation; from time to time subordinates arrived, joined us, left. Hours passed. The old man was not there. Nor was a bird. Eventually the police officer spoke of the heat, the rain, asked if I had been to Bogor. He said it was cool up there in the mountains, and there were so many beautiful walks, so much wildlife to see. He said this weekend he was thinking of going there with his family— would I like to join them? I felt awkward inside; I did not think I would be an enjoyable companion for his family, who probably spoke only Indonesian. In Indonesia it is impolite to say no to anyone’s request; to show you are a friend, you say I will look for it for you tomorrow, or I will come next week. So I thanked him and said I would check with my friend and if he did not have other plans already made, I would come. As I walked away, I worked out what had happened; when the old man was not there at nine with the bird, the officer had sent his men out to ask after him. They had come back without finding him. In fact the old man had not been able to locate a Moluccan cockatoo. In Indonesia one can count on the word of a member of one’s community. The old man had been unable to face the officer who had put his trust in him. No doubt he would come

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when I was gone. But the officer did not judge it enough to explain this to me. As an official of the community, he considered it his task to resolve the discord; since he had not been able to supply a cockatoo for me, he took it upon himself to give me what was really important to me: a weekend spent with an Indonesian family— his own. I am not sure whether I should have accepted, but I understood that while it would have resolved the inequity for the officer, it would have only if I had not felt compelled to agree. A gift is not a gift if it is imposed.

The System

I was on my way back. I had spent the summer in Kenya. There was a plane change in Cairo and then a flight to Paris. I had a day in Paris, and then the onward flight to New York, and then Pittsburgh and back to my teaching job. I stopped at American Express to see if there was mail: there was a letter from my mother telling me that my father had taken a turn for the worse and was hospitalized. I went to Franck’s apartment. Franck had traveled the countries tourists avoid and always third class trains and buses. We went out to a restaurant. I told Franck of my father’s hospitalization and said I would go to a travel agent and get an onward flight from New York to Chicago. Franck mentioned there was a direct flight to Chicago from Paris. But I had already my return to New York. After lunch Franck said, “Let’s go to the travel agent I use.” He spoke to the agent, and before I realized it, he had purchased a one-way Paris–Chicago ticket and handed it to me. After visiting my father, ill in the hospital, I had to go to my job. I took out a small loan and had the bank wire Franck the $527 he had paid for the ticket. But when I got my bank statement at the end of the month, I saw that with the dollar-frank exchange rate and the bank charges, he had only received the equivalent of $492. I wrote him my embarrassment that he had not received the full amount I had posted for him and said I would now get him the rest. By return mail he wrote, “Let us be grateful that the system does not work as well as we had feared.”

Truth in Reconciliation

I spent the month of August 2009 in Phnom Penh and attended sessions of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, the joint UNCambodia Court that was trying five “Khmer Rouge” leaders of Democratic Kampuchea for crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. Let me summarily recall that epoch. Cambodia became a French colony in 1867 and acquired independence under Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1953. Sihanouk maintained neutrality during the American war in Vietnam, as he was personally convinced that the Vietcong would ultimately triumph. But he ruthlessly suppressed leftist movements within Cambodia, whom he dubbed “Khmer Rouge.” In 1970 Sihanouk was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Lon Nol entered into alliance with the United States and authorized the American secret bombing of suspected Vietcong bases in Cambodia, which soon become a carpet- bombing of the eastern half of Cambodia. Several insurgent armies, joined as the Cambodian People’s National Liberation Armed Forces, advanced under heavy US bombardment, defeating the demoralized Lon Nol troops, and on April 17, 1975, they occupied Phnom Penh. A twelve- person “Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Cambodia” was set up as the highest governing body. In November 1978, a Vietnamese army of 180,000 troops invaded Cambodia, and on January 7, 1979, entered Phnom Penh and set up first Cambodian Heng Samrin and then Hun Sen as prime minister. But the “Khmer Rouge” continued to occupy large areas of the country, representing Cambodian resistance to the Vietnamese occupiers. Vietnam withdrew its occupying army in 1989, leaving Hun Sen in charge of the government. Four armed factions then fought for power until 1998, when their troops accepted amnesty and their leaders were integrated into the Hun Sen government.

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The joint UN-Cambodia Court that is trying five top surviving “Khmer Rouge” leaders of “Democratic Kampuchea” aims to fix on these four men and one woman personal responsibility for the deaths of up to a million and a half people through executions, hardship, disease, and malnutrition during the three years and eight months, from 1975 to 1979, of Democratic Kampuchea. The court will execute retributive justice, inflicting punishment on these five for their deeds. The punishment meted out is to serve as deterrence against future ill-minded political and military leaders in the world. The trial is also to serve as a forum in which victims will be heard and their dignity restored. It intends to establish the truth about gross human rights abuses. The Cambodia of the future where former enemies will have to be reconciled or at least live in nonviolent coexistence can, it is believed, only be built on the basis of knowledge of the truth, truth about the years from 1975 to 1979. The first defendant put on trial, in February 2009, was Kaing Guek Eav. He had been the director of the S-21 interrogation center in Phnom Penh, where party officials and military officers suspected of subversion or treason were interrogated. In the three years of its existence, at least twelve thousand people were interrogated there, kept in harsh conditions, and tortured. Almost all of them were then taken outside of the city and executed. Only seven are known to have survived. Kaing Guek Eav was selected to be tried first because the S-21 interrogation center kept detailed documentation of the proceedings there, and much of this documentation was recovered when the city fell to the Vietnamese army. In addition, when he was arrested, Kaing agreed to cooperate with the police and then the court. The prosecutors plan to use his testimony in the trial of the other four, who have not pleaded guilty. Kaing Guek Eav was born in 1942 in a poor rural area in central Cambodia. Only when he was nine years old did he receive his first schooling, from a monk who taught him to read and write. But he proved to be exceptionally gifted and went on to secondary school and then to university, majoring in mathematics. In his baccalaureate examinations he placed second in the nation. He returned to his home region and became a teacher and then vice principal of a lycée. Suspected of leftist sympathies by the police of Prince Sihanouk, he was arrested in 1968, imprisoned, and tortured. Two years later, Sihanouk was deposed by General Lon Nol; to marshal support Lon Nol amnestied political prisoners, and Kaing was freed. During the US carpet-bombing of Cambodia, Kaing joined the resistance, taking the nom de guerre “Mit Duch”—“Comrade Duch.” His unit captured a French anthropologist, François Bizot, whom they suspected of being a foreign agent.

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Mit Duch interrogated Bizot without harsh treatment for three months, gradually became convinced that he was in fact an anthropologist, and then argued his case with Pol Pot. Bizot was released.1 After insurgent forces occupied Phnom Penh and the Communist Party of Cambodia organized the new government, Mit Duch was posted in the S-21 interrogation center and later was made its director. He had requested a transfer to the industrial sector, but his request had been denied. On January 7, 1979, as the Vietnamese armies entered Phnom Penh, Mit Duch and his family and staff fled. In the “Khmer Rouge” strongholds that resisted the Vietnamese, over the next twenty years Kaing Guek Eav set up schools and wrote textbooks. He learned Thai and English and taught mathematics and English. In 1995 assailants attacked his home and murdered his wife; Kaing was injured but managed to escape. While grieving the death of his wife, he began to frequent an evangelical Khmer-American preacher named Christopher Lapel. He was baptized and practiced his new Christian faith fervently. In 1997 he was recruited by the American Refugee Committee to work as the community health supervisor in a refugee camp in Thailand. The next year he returned to Cambodia and worked with World Vision, a Christian relief agency. In 1999 he was identified as the former Mit Duch by Irish journalist Nic Dunlop, who made a media sensation of his discovery. Kaing was subsequently arrested and held without charge for nine years until the joint UN-Cambodia Court was constituted and he was put on trial. He admitted his role as director of the S-21 interrogation center and all his recorded and unrecorded actions there.2 He affirmed that he had not wanted this position but had been unable to refuse, that he reported all his actions and his meticulous records to the Interior Ministry and everything that he did was under specific orders, and that he was under constant surveillance; had he deviated, he would have been liquidated and his family with him. Each day Kaing Guek Eav watches and listens as survivors and relatives of those incarcerated in S-21 and subsequently executed tell of their lost ones; they are given unlimited time by the court to speak. Kaing never relaxes his focused attention. At the end of the testimony, he is asked to respond. If he has nothing to question about the testimony, he declares his excruciating grief and remorse for their suffering. Sometimes his voice breaks, he sobs. But sometimes he contests something; he says the witness could not have seen him where the witness had said and explains his job and procedures as evidence. Or he asks the court to bring up the relevant prison document; he has examined the thousands of pages so well that often he can ask for

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a document by its identification number. When the document has been projected on a screen for all to see, he will say: “You see, that is not my signature.” His trial concluded in November 2009. There is no death penalty now in Cambodia. In view of his cooperation, the UN-appointed prosecutor asked that he be sentenced not to life but forty years imprisonment. The defense lawyers argued that while many top policy makers of the “Khmer Rouge” were not on trial, Kaing Guek Eav had no room for maneuver in the position he held. In view of his remorse and his full cooperation with the investigations, and in view of his now ten-year imprisonment, the Cambodian defense lawyer argued that he be released. The European press saw in this political pressure from the Hun Sen government. The “Khmer Rouge” had never been defeated militarily; it was by granting amnesty not only to soldiers but also to top leaders that the Hun Sen government was able to end the civil war that had raged from 1979 to 1998. In the former “Khmer Rouge”–held territories the same authorities are in power, now invested by the Hun Sen government. But the Western powers want the “Khmer Rouge” leaders being tried to be sentenced to maximum punishment for what they identify as the worst case of crimes against humanity since Nazi Germany. I for my part could not keep my eyes off Kaing Guek Eav and wondered what it is like to be Kaing Guek Eav. And wondered what good it would do to now imprison this sixty-seven-year-old man, who for the last twenty years had been a schoolteacher teaching mathematics and working with relief agencies. What would be accomplished, for him and for us, and for twelve thousand people now dead, by imprisoning him for the rest of his life? I was each day struck by the commitment he so assiduously maintained as he devoted his full attention to each witness: that what occurred and what he did be truthfully recorded. His memory and his mathematical intelligence were wholly employed to record the exact truth. I wondered over this, this single-minded devotion to the truth. The truth of the past conflict is incontestably essential for political leaders who have to reconstruct society and build political institutions with factions that have been in conflict. It is supremely important to people to know when and where their family members and comrades were disappeared, if and how they were tortured, if and when they were executed and where buried or burned. The truth of the past conflict is vital for victims who have been dishonored and maligned. It is important for perpetrators who have to come to terms with their past and their futures. Establishing the truth is imperative

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for historians, who have to help provide humanity with an understanding of its conflicts and disasters. But in Phnom Penh I came to wonder about how effective a trial, such as the joint UN-Cambodia trial, is to produce truth about the past. What is adjudicated in criminal justice courts is limited to the accusation the prosecution has prepared and by the limits of the verifiable evidence available. Further, the courts are ill equipped to deal with the broader context of an aggression or injury, for example, a state of generalized hostility and disorder that may characterize two communities in conflict. On trial with Kaing Guek Eav are the four surviving members, three men and one woman, now all in their eighties, of the former twelve-person Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.3 The other eight members of that committee have died in the meantime. The Hun Sen government argued, and the UN reluctantly conceded, that prosecuting the “Khmer Rouge” leaders who had accepted amnesty and been integrated into the army and government would break up the fragile state and possibly relaunch the civil war that had ravaged Cambodia. Thus considerations of the political unity and stability of the state, or more exactly, of the Hun Sen regime, functioned to restrict responsibility to these four men and one woman.4 The inevitable veto from the UN Security Council prohibited the UN-Cambodia Court from indicting US president Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who ordered the carpet-bombing of neutral Cambodia that killed, according to the CIA, 200,000 people, drove two million to seek refuge in the cities, and destroyed the dikes and irrigation systems upon which the food production of the country depended. Criminal justice courts are also ill equipped to deal with the trauma the victim is suffering or the forgiveness that the victim may have achieved. Nor are they equipped to deal with the remorse and determination to amend and restore the harm inflicted that the perpetrator may have. Yet these issues are central to what has to be discussed and dealt with for reconciliation to occur. Would other kinds of commissions or meetings where these things can be set forth produce the kind of truth that is required for reconciliation? More generally, I wondered how truth is determined among people whose different perceptions and judgments led them to war. What kind of truth can be established? How much of the truth about their violent past is necessary for communities to begin to coexist and build a common future? A certain number of physical facts can be established, although normally by official agencies and experts, not by the parties meeting to speak. Mass or hidden graves can be exhumed, corpses identified, secret prisons and torture chambers located. Documents and records can be located and made avail-

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able. But just having victim and perpetrator each tell of what he or she did and what he or she suffered and having each side respond to the other does not produce “objective truth.” In the criminal justice courts, it is believed that that requires an outside, third party— the judge and jury— to assess each account. We say, “History will judge,” thinking that it is the historians who will later produce the objective account of what really happened, in South Africa, Chile, Kosovo, or Cambodia. But historians acknowledge that their accounts are written according to contemporary concepts of causation, contemporary concepts of how demographic, geographical, economic, political, and ideological factors intervene to produce historical events. Their account of the Cuban missile crisis, even their account of the wars of Genghis Khan are written for contemporary American or Mongolian readers, whose interests and concerns the historian to some measure shares. Is it then instead “subjective truth” that is put forth when the parties in conflict agree to meet and listen to one another? That is, a sincere and honest account by each party of how each views the situation, what evaluations and judgments, what goals each holds, and what feelings of anger, humiliation, craving for revenge, or of empowerment, freedom, and impunity each finds in himself or herself? Could there be produced “intersubjective truth”? After the confrontation both parties may recognize that they have found or produced agreement about a certain number of events and how they are to be described. But there may well remain areas of disagreement, because each side has incompatible legal claims to the same land or resources, or because the sides have irreconcilable conceptions of the economic and political order that they take to be just. How does one know that the account one gives is sincere and honest? How good an account can one give of how one views the conflict? There may be factors in the political and social situation that induce one to see things in a certain light but that one does not recognize. How good an account can one give of the feelings, of anger, humiliation, craving for revenge, or of empowerment, freedom, and impunity one finds in oneself? There may be unconscious feelings, memories, and drives that one does not recognize. The way a militant views his actions during the conflict may not coincide with how he views them later when his side has been defeated. Will he be able to give a lucid account of that difference? There is something distorting in a situation where an individual stands alone and recounts what he or she did; this situation tends to ascribe or attribute individual responsibility. But to really understand how individuals

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commit violent aggressions, we may have to take into account the training and conditioning those individuals were given and also a situation of generalized conflict and violence that may have obtained. And how will others know that one’s account is sincere and honest? It is not enough that the victims know who perpetrated crimes against them and why; the perpetrators must acknowledge them. They must declare, confess, what they did, and do so before their victims who still survive. They have a moral duty to confess their crimes, to restore the dignity of those they humiliated, tortured, and killed. It is only in this acknowledgment that the victims are no longer denied recognition of their humanity. What the perpetrator will say, can say, will be affected by the consequences he or she foresees. Will he or she be punished or amnestied? Accepted into the community or shunned as a pariah? Will he or she be tracked down by comrades who denounce him or her for betrayal or by victims who will seek vengeance? Will the acknowledgment be accepted? Will it be perceived to be sincere? Leigh Payne’s book Unsettling Accounts5 studies cases where members of police, army, and intelligence units confessed to crimes in the civil wars and military repressions in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Some of these confessions were perceived by the public to issue from remorse. Some were seen to have been made to obtain amnesty. Others were declarations of the heroic nature of the cause in which the crimes were committed, the loyalty and dedication of the perpetrator, the depravity of the enemy. Others were seen to reveal a sadistic satisfaction in perpetrating crimes and also a sadistic satisfaction in imposing accounts of them on the public. Many involved silence about or denials of many abuses and silence about coperpetrators. Some seemed to exhibit a sort of traumatized amnesia about horrors in which the confessing one participated. Some appeared to be motivated by the perpetrator judging himself to have been betrayed by his superiors or collaborators and wishing to betray them in turn, to implicate them in ignominy. The public was largely skeptical of confessions where the author of the confession was perceived to be betraying his colleagues, seeking to distance himself from them, or seeking amnesty. When the one confessing appeared frequently on television or published a book, belief in him or her decreased. The rhetoric of the confession, the demeanor and body language of the one confessing also significantly determined whether the public believed him or her or did not. Even his or her dress was a factor, and the one confessing was aware of that, sometimes dressing in military dress uniform, or in the clothes of the common man.

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The victim too has motives, conscious and unconscious, for distorting, exaggerating, even inventing abuses he or she suffered. Much of the force, even convincingness, of the account depends on how it is told. Rhetorical factors shape the victim’s account. In Cambodia today victims are recounting their sufferings to the joint UN- Cambodia Court trying crimes against humanity. How accurate is human memory of events from thirty years ago? How reliable is identifying a person you last saw thirty years ago? Greatly traumatic events are not simply retained by memory; they are integrated in a course of mental life that continually opens upon a future of new events and actions. In some cases they block access to the future: the victim lives in his or her trauma and cannot live in a now that is different and envision a future that arrays new possibilities. In other cases the reverse happens: the trauma is closed off to consciousness, cannot be recalled, cannot be understood or interpreted. In every case, as the years pass, what one has undertaken and lived through modifies what one remembers of a traumatic aggression and how one remembers it. It is currently said that knowing the truth brings closure, or that truth heals. The notion that, through meeting with the other side of the conflict, through declaration and response between victim and perpetrator, when some measure of intersubjective truth is established, closure is accomplished— that notion is metaphorical and misleading. There may be the sense that the essential has been said and agreed upon. But the sincerity and completeness of what was said by victim and by perpetrator remain provisional; each side will always feel that there is more to be said. And agreeing that the essential has been established by no means brings an end to the suffering of the victim.6 Nor does it bring an end to the career of the perpetrator, who is afflicted with the tormenting problem of how to live his or her life now that his or her cause has been acknowledged to be unjust, his or her militancy futile, and his or her status in the community dishonored. The notion that “truth heals,” that when the victim is given voice to speak and be heard and the perpetrator acknowledges the harm inflicted, the victim’s reputation and dignity in the community is restored— this notion is also metaphorical and misleading. When one has been tortured or raped, one’s loved ones disappeared, when one has lost years of life in imprisonment, there is no restoration or compensation. When people have suffered a grave physical, psychological, or moral injury or the loss of those closest to them, they have to harbor this loss, honor and cherish what was lost, and assemble whatever resources are possible to be able to live. To begin to live again, the victim will also have to find material and social resources. Vivid

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reexperiencing of the event, fear, nightmares, feelings of helplessness, depression, self-blame, relationship difficulties, feelings of social disconnectedness, anxiety, sometimes substance abuse are all sufferings that may take long-term community support, professional care, and time to diminish, and they may never diminish. Communities and individuals will not seek reconciliation with their formerly armed enemies as long as they are convinced of the overriding justice of their cause and the real possibility of imposing it by violence. And it is illusory and indeed repugnant to seek to induce peoples to maintain tolerant and respectful relations with one another when they are being occupied, oppressed, humiliated, and killed by the political and military forces of another. Unless those peoples can envision and hope for a situation when they would coexist with their enemies without being degraded and oppressed by them, coexistence and reconciliation will not be possible. Truth seeking also requires certain social conditions. All sides in conflict will have to be open to the possibility that crimes that they have committed will be disclosed. Their dignity and very identity may be at risk. For peoples and communities to take that risk, a certain level of social and cultural security will have to have been established. Confrontation of victim and perpetrator to establish the truth of past crimes, oppression, and abuses is not the only and may not be the best way to work for restoration of the wounded and traumatized victims and reintegration into a community of coexistence. Methods to achieve integration on another plane, a symbolic plane, are widespread across cultures. The sufferer may make some kind of sense of his or her suffering and find resources to begin to live again by situating his or her suffering in the cosmic realm, identifying it with the suffering of spiritual beings or gods, and seeking help from beneficent deities. Since myths and religions are social structures, the sufferer is supported by the religious community and its ministers. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his study “The Effectiveness of Symbols,”7 has shown this process in his study of shamans and healers. Historical figures of victims, of perpetrators, of mediators, and of peacemakers also come to exist on the symbolic plane, and peoples and communities seeking a new coexistence will identify with them and understand their situation and their longings through these symbolic figures. Since truth can harm people as well as benefit them, sometimes it may be better that some facts about the past remain unknown. The most effective methods for obtaining the truth may violate the rule of law, personal privacy, or the right not to incriminate oneself. Such methods might be too costly in relation to other goals. The joint UN-Cambodia Court to try the

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surviving five “Khmer Rouge” leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, scheduled to last five years,8 in the first year of its operation cost $170 million, and one might wonder if such a sum would not be better spent to provide psychiatric services, health services, schools, and economic aid to the country. Some truths about the past may be irrelevant to reckoning with the disasters and sufferings of people left by past conflicts and crimes. There may be times when, for reconciliation, telling what happened and what one suffered may be less important than not repeating the inflammatory words of the past and the accusatory and fighting words of the present. There is, finally, the troubling phenomenon that meetings where the sides in conflict recount the crimes they endured and inflicted may deepen hostility, arouse waves of revenge killings, increase the level of hostility and violence. When there is generalized violence in a society, that in itself conveys a sense that violence is intrinsic to human nature, promotes cynicism, and produces more violence. Did all the publicized crimes revealed in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission contribute to such a situation? The high levels of criminality in South Africa since the end of apartheid have been accompanied by gross human rights violations by the police. Between April 2001 and March 2002, 585 people died in police custody or as a result of police action. The torture of criminal suspects by the police continues. A recent survey revealed that 70 percent of South African respondents of all races “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement that “criminals have too many rights.” Thirty-one percent of all South Africans feel that the police have the right to use force to extract information from criminal suspects.9 Still, facing one another and telling one’s suffering and telling the deeds one has perpetrated does bring about an expansion of information and also understanding of motives and suffering. It limits the denial and also the dramatization of suffering, what has been called “triumphalism of pain.” It complicates the process of rationalization both perpetrator and victim have undertaken, have had to undertake. The community and political leaders in projecting future institutions and economic projects will have to take account of how each side saw the situation. But those views can change. After the devastating civil war in Finland in 1918, the internecine conflict between collaborationist and resistant French after World War II, after the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, as after World War II in Japan, there were no institutions set up to establish the truth of crimes perpetrated on fellow citizens. Yet reconciliation between the parties in conflict did take place, as the political leadership concentrated on building the future. It is

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true: the past passes. And there is also the biological renewal: generations pass, and the new generation will not have all the causes for conflict and for recrimination of the older generation. The Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, where the joint UN-Cambodia trial is being conducted, are located in a building in a military base some thirty kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. Each day the NGOs, funded by outside countries, bus in people from the outlying countryside to watch the trial for a day. The NGOs want the Cambodian people, who have had little reason, for the past 150 years since their country became a French colony, to trust in courts, to see the exemplary case of a United Nations trial, thorough and fair. They want the Cambodian people to see that the terrible sufferings of thirty years ago will not pass with impunity. The commitment to justice of these NGOs is clear. But I learned that they sometimes hear different words from the Cambodians they bus to the trial. Some of them are uncomfortable with the concept of punishment, retribution, revenge. They may invoke the teaching of the monks: that to wish evil on those who have done evil is to harbor evil in oneself. Thirty years have passed; more than half of the population of Cambodia was born after these events; to hear them recounted and to represent them to themselves do not arouse the intense passions they arouse in those who lived through them. They feel that it is by an effort of imagination and will that they produce feelings of revenge in themselves. They may recognize a troubling kinship of what retribution they may will with the will of the evildoers on trial. Former deputy secretary of the Central Committee Nuon Chea had long retired to his home village, occupying himself raising ducks. When the UN-mandated police came to arrest him, some of his neighbors said to reporters: he is an old man now and no harm to anybody. Of Cambodians polled by the Documentation Center of Cambodia in 2002, 68.96 percent said that they would not get enraged and want to take revenge if they discovered that surviving villagers were those who killed their relatives.10 Many were explicit that taking matters into their own hands would put them on the same level as those who committed the original crimes.11 As expressing one’s emotions of anger, bitterness, and vengefulness or one’s sorrow and suffering are not the norm in Cambodian culture, so apologizing is also not the norm.12 Laura McGrew reports a discussion of the trial conducted by an NGO in which a participant said, “To say I’m sorry is a difficult thing to say. It is not a Cambodian habit to say this. We seldom find people who will say excuse me or pardon me.”13

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The Venerable Yos Hut Khamacaro explained: Buddhism doesn’t recommend repentance or regret. You must have a good spirit to accomplish good things here and now. If you live with remorse you cannot focus on the present actions. You shouldn’t continue to suffer, if you commit a crime. You should just try to understand that if you have done this bad thing, you will have bad consequences. You should consider the past crime as a mistake or error, and you should try to learn and gain advice for your present actions. If you live in the past, it is not good. There is no need for remorse, just understand the cause and effect and try to learn from your mistakes.14

The NGOs heard some Cambodians invoke the concept of karma— that the evil men do will have its effects on the evildoers, if not in this life, in another. Although this doctrine seems to confirm the principle of human retributive justice, it also acknowledges the limits of that justice. Rationality is calculation of what is due to each, and from the beginning of philosophy Socrates affirmed that evildoers are punished and the wise and just are rewarded. But health, a sound body and mind, the resources of the world are not equitably distributed by nature; all too often we see the unjust prosper and the just struck down by disease or accident. Medicine strives to correct deformities and heal sickness; moral systems and judicial institutions seek to stop and punish the corruption and violence of the unjust. Yet chance and bad luck will not be eliminated, and our political and economic institutions have not been able to counteract the greed and cruelty of many. Will trials such as the joint UN-Cambodia trial succeed in putting an end to juridical impunity in Cambodia, in deterring tyrants and oppressors? The Nuremberg trials have not done so. We must, in order to coexist, devise norms to govern our actions— the more urgently today when local conflicts affect much wider regions and peoples and when the weapons we have stockpiled are devastating. Yet we do find that those who govern their actions by those norms all too often are cut down, while those who defy those norms succeed with power and cunning. This situation constitutes one of the major metaphysical dilemmas that confronts all ethical and political thought. In face of this situation there are perhaps three positions possible for us: We can wager that the evil men do will have evil consequences on the evildoer, if not in this life, in another. We can wager that an omniscient and just God will undertake to punish evildoers in this life and in the next. We can accept a tragic view of human

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life in an indifferent natural world and of a history whose directions we have not understood how to master. One day, having listened intently for seven hours as witnesses recounted the torture and execution of their families lost in mass graves, Kaing Guek Eav was shaking with tears and blurted out that the court must sentence him “to the most severe punishment they could devise. Like the torments of Jesus,” he gasped. My mind was reeling. Can the human mind make any kind of sense out of the irreparable? When someone has lost those he or she holds most dear, does any kind of restitution make sense? Is not our juridical practice of consigning huge sums of money— millions— to victims a mockery of reason? Does the torture of one man restore the thousands whose torture and execution he managed? If God had tortured his only son, how has that changed the world he created, where millions continue to be oppressed and tortured and massacred? What can a man who acknowledges that he has perpetrated irreparable crimes do with his life henceforth? In 1979 in Nicaragua the Sandinista guerrilla armies entered and occupied Managua. Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled by plane to the United States with his family and the funds of the national treasury. Tomás Borge was the only leader of the original Sandinista rebellion who had survived the war; he had been captured and tortured in Somoza’s prisons, and his wife had been raped and murdered in his presence. He was named minister of the interior of the new government. One day some from his staff came to him and told him that among the captured prisoners of Somoza’s army they believed they had identified the men who had tortured him. Borge went to the prison and confronted the men. He confirmed that they were indeed his torturers. He ordered them freed. But the main body of Somoza’s army fled to Honduras and Costa Rica, was reorganized and armed by the United States, and continued the war.

PA R T V I

Irrevocable

I feel compelled to lie down in this numbing density of silence, to companion and comfort the dying at these cold depths at the foot of the solstice: those that have fled from the falcon in the sky, from the hawk in the dark of the wood, from the foxes, stoats, and weasels, now running over the frozen fields, from the otter swimming in the icy brook; those whose blood now courses from the hunting frost, whose frail hearts choke in the clawed frost’s bitter grip. — J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

The Babies in Trees

We go to nature— to the town park, to the woods out of town, in the summer to the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. Phalanxes of trees stand guard in zones of nature. In trees we see the power of life lifting inert minerals into enduring, ascending, ordering forms. A sequoia, one individual life converting rock and rain into up to six thousand tons of life (the biggest animals, blue whales, weigh up to 176 tons). The power of life creating so many distinctive forms (biologists estimate there are 100,000 species of trees). We wonder at the life in trees and obscurely sense that that life has kinship with the life in us. To walk the forest is to walk into the past. Our primate ancestors lived in trees. Trees were their food, their protection, their homes; trees lifted them from the earth toward the free spaces where sunlight rebounds. Descending from the trees, the human primates stood erect, holding onto trees, then taking on the upright posture of trees. Harmony and tranquility dwell in forests. The ordered architecture of trees, where each branch in its place serves the whole, gives us the vision of order and justice, which we extend into human society and into bodies of thought. In trees that endure years of drought and storms we see dignity. Maintaining dignity, we stand for honesty, for righteousness; we stand tall. As we walk the fractal immensities of the forest efface the forest’s outer limits; its passing forms stroke us lightly, putting no claims on us. Our mind tires of recalling the names and classifications taxonomists have put on them, stops the stringing up of relationships and causalities, lets go of purposes. Our consciousness becomes a space where branches zigzag, arcs of light glint in the green, shadows pass without disturbing anything, unseen birds trill, insects drone and whisper. We move in step with the march of the trees across the hill; through our bodies flows of air and blood and

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nutrients surge and subside in sync with the buoyant breezes and the pulse of sunbeams and shadows. We drift into nature; our self-programmed, selfmotivating individuality dissolves in nature, into nature. Katherine and I went to Tana Toraja, a region of high mountains on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. We walked under clumps of giant bamboo, their hollow canes rubbing and resonating with one another, the rambling tentacles of oaks and chestnuts in the fog, conifer pikes and spires on the wobbly crests and the canyon walls. Over centuries the Toraja people have carved the flanks of mountains into terraces for wet rice cultivation. Katherine and I admired their houses, which stand high on wooden piles, built without nails or screws, solely by tongueand-groove construction. The outer walls are richly ornamented with incised black, red, yellow, and white carvings. The massive roofs are of multilayered split bamboo and shaped in soaring arcs like harps whose invisible strings are fingered by the winds. We learned that their culture elaborated an intricate cosmology and the Aluk To Dolo (Way of the Ancestor) prescribed complex rituals for birth and life—rambu tuka (smoke rising) the ascending smoke ceremonies, and for death, rambu solo (smoke descending). Although today most have adopted Christianity, the ancient beliefs and rituals still govern their civil organization, agricultural and economic practices, and ceremonies. The most elaborate and important ceremonies are funerals. In the weeks we were there, we attended four. The ceremony is often held weeks, months, or years after the death so that the deceased’s family can raise the funds needed. Around a grassy central arena they build ceremonial funeral structures, shelters for audiences, and lodging for visitors. The funeral ceremonies last four days— sometimes, we were told, ten days. Hundreds of people come, some, we learned, from other islands and other countries. People from every community with which this community has ancestral, marital, economic, or political relations come to the funeral. They arrive at the ceremonial arena in procession, clad in their finest clothing. With them are groups trained to perform chants and dances. They bring pigs and water buffalo to be sacrificed. Meat from the sacrificed animals is distributed to the guests. Several older people told us that the funerals today are as elaborate and draw as many communities together as a generation ago. The modernizers in the government have not succeeded in inducing the Toraja to instead devote all this labor and all these resources to productive enterprises. (The

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water buffalo are here not, as everywhere in Asia, used for plowing the fields or hauling carts but are only raised to be sacrificed in funerals.) We understood that the death is a trauma not only for the family and friends but also in the multiple communities bound in various kinds of cooperation and exchange with the family. The family binds itself to return offerings of pigs and buffalo in the coming deaths and funerals that will occur in their communities. The solemn assemblage of communities and exchange of gifts reinstate and affirm their solidarity. But the funeral also affirms that the individual person is not totally lost. We visited the granite cliffs where graves are bored in the rock, sometimes at great heights. In wooden balconies set on the cliffs there were carved wooden statues of the dead; the newer ones depicted individuals with realism. We were told that they guard the dead and protect the living. Pak Tandi led us through the forest. The late afternoon sun sent low shafts of light guiding us between the tree trunks and the canes of giant bamboo. We stopped before a huge tree whose trunk had a dozen patches of black palm fibers. Inside, he said, are the bodies of babies— stillborn babies, and babies who die before their first milk tooth emerges. A baby without teeth cannot speak, cannot spread falsehood. The baby that dies is brought here immediately. The family bores a hole in the trunk of the tree and places the baby inside. The opening is closed with palm fibers; eventually the tree will grow over the opening and seal the baby inside itself. The tree that is chosen, a Tarra tree, has white milk sap that flows when the hole is cut in it and surrounds the baby with nourishment, the vital milk that the mother is unable to give it. And the tree takes nourishment from the body and soul of the baby. The love of the parents continues in the tree. The tree continues its ascent to the skies. When it is time for the mother tree to let them go, the babies, unable to crawl or walk, are wafted by the wind and ascend to papua— the separated, sacred dimension.

Mortality

Socrates made learning how to die the subject matter of philosophy and made philosophy the daily practice of dying. He speaks of the relief he will feel when the opacity of his body will be broken. His last words, “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius,”1 say that life is the sickness for which death is the cure. Did not Socrates here claim to know things that he did not know: what death is— that death is a relief— and what life is— that life is sickness? Socrates died the way he did in order to demonstrate his belief that the soul is of its nature immortal. Socrates had seen men die; he had committed himself to defend Athens in war, and he had killed men in battle. He does not speak of how they died or of the relief he felt when they died.

Death and Nothingness Martin Heidegger, proclaiming the end of the metaphysics launched by Plato’s Socrates, makes death— one’s own death— again the central topic it had been for Socrates. Heidegger disclaims the conception that death is an accident that befalls a life that of its nature would endure unendingly. He sets out to show that we die of our own nature, that our life casts itself with all its forces unto its end. Heidegger finds the experience of one’s mortality in anxiety.2 He distinguishes anxiety from fear. Fear is the grasp of something dangerous. It gives me the sense of my vulnerability. Fear gives rise to a mobilization of my powers to center on the threatening object or event and overcome it or flee from it. Anxiety has no identifiable object; it is a sense of danger lurking everywhere. It is the sense of one’s whole existence being threatened. Anxiety, Heidegger says, anticipates my experience of dying. He interprets anxiety

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to reveal that my dying is passage from existence to nothingness, annihilation, and annihilation, for me, of the world about me. Anxiety, that sense of being cast adrift, the environment no longer supporting me, sustaining me, is a premonition of being cast into nothingness. Heidegger means to force me to see that my death is pure nothingness, that I am destined to be nothing. Heidegger thus also claims to know what death is. He identifies it— it is this one thing, nothingness.3 The death I know is my death; the nothingness I know is the imminent nothingness of my existence and of my field of experience. From the opening pages of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Heidegger finds that witnessing the death of others is not the source of my sense of my mortality. At the wake, I have only seen the body of another immobilized, tranquilized, but still fully, completely there. I have not seen annihilation. But annihilation is what my death will be for me.

Nothingness, Futurity, Possibility, Finalities Heidegger brings together the future, the possible, goals, death, and nothingness. The sense of mortality that is anxiety is a premonition of being cast into nothingness. It anticipates a moment ahead when nothing further is possible. The anticipation brings into relief a field on this side of the brink of nothingness, where things are still possible. This field is the future.4 For my sense of the real future is not simply the logically possible— what I represent now by varying the layout of the actual. This representation exists only as a representation and exists in the present. My sense of the real future is also not simply produced by drawing out the implications and possibilities that I see in the present; this likewise produces but a representation in the now. What is really future is actually possible, and the actually possible is possibly impossible. The sense of the actually possible and future is produced by the anticipation of the really impossible. The anticipation of ending makes possible the fixing of ends.5 The sense of my death is the sense of ending definitively and irrevocably. It gives me an inward understanding of termination in the continuity of the world, which makes possible every sense of goal and every sense of destination. The sense of one’s life as a trajectory that casts itself with all its forces unto its end makes action possible, where life casts some or all of its forces toward some term. The sense of the future, the sense of the possible, the consciousness of goals and the sense of mortality are thus equivalent. Heidegger also brings

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together the most thoroughgoing freedom with the utter inevitability of death. To exist in view of death is to live in the future and the possible, is to set goals and advance toward them. But has Heidegger seen correctly the relationship between death, the last moment, and the future? For Heidegger, anxiety, by which I cast myself ahead over the whole range of the possible unto the brink of definitive and irrevocable impotence, is what brings out into relief the extent of a future that is my future. My death is the last moment in my time. But it is not a not-yet-present moment in the line of future moments, moments coming toward presence. It is a moment without duration, an instant, an instantaneous cut in the line of time extending before me. And the last moment does not really lie at the end of a line of moments to come; it is imminent in any moment. The next moment may be the last moment. The possibility of my death lies with each step of my advance into the outlying environment; a falling roof tile may strike me; my heart may fail. Anticipating my death in anxiety does not open before me the field of the moments of time to come; it divines the abyss lurking in any moment. Then the undercurrent of anxiety can freeze initiative at the start instead of engaging the anxious one in the possibilities ahead and the resources at hand.

Death and Singularity Heidegger separates utterly the death of others, observed outside, from my death, sensed inwardly in anxiety.6 It is this sense of my death that isolates me and posits me for myself as a singular existent. To look at the environment about me is to look ahead; to see things is to see possibilities: paths, implements, obstacles, tasks, opportunities. They extend indefinitely, possibilities open for anyone. My death advances toward me as the brink of the abyss, of utter impossibility. It outlines, in the outlying field of all that is possible in general, for anyone, an expanse of what is yet possible for me. It also reveals, under my feet, resources available to me. The acute sense of my mortality thus illuminates for me an expanse of possibilities possible for me. At the same time the anxiety that throws me back upon myself makes me feel what is unrealized in me, the potentialities and powers that are in me and have remained in suspense. Hence the sense of my vulnerability, contingency, mortality is also the sense of my being, my powers, my singularity. Heidegger thus traces how the sense of the negative, pushed all the way, converts into the most positive, positing experience. It posits my existence

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in all its singularity. Death, the last limit of impotence, is turned into power, my power. Feeling myself adrift in the void, nothing supporting me, nothing to hold on to, I am thrown back upon the powers that still subsist in me, the powers that are my own. No longer counting on the support of the world or of others, taking up the powers that are my own, I now resolutely act on my own, exist on my own. To live one’s life is to live out one’s life, to discharge one’s forces in the tasks and resources that the environment presents one. And that is the active enactment of dying. Heidegger sees the anxious one resolutely driving his life with all his forces toward his death as toward its closure. But death comes, of itself. Death is stalking me and strikes when it wills. Death is not like a future, the brink where the field of possibles ends in the abyss, that we can envision and advance toward. The death that is coming for me remains exterior to the death I anticipate. This exteriority of death undermines the Heideggerian project to appropriate the power of death, to make of it my ecstasy and power.

Knowing Nothingness, Longing for Nothingness Does anxiety really identify death to be nothingness? What is distinctive of anxiety, as contrasted with fear, is that anxiety has no identifiable object. It is a foreboding concerning what is indeterminate. What I am anxious about is the unknown—not something that I know to be nothingness. We could compare the situation that arouses anxiety with our edginess in the night. What makes the night disquieting is not a perception of something dangerous but the fact that possible dangers are not localizable in things. We no longer perceive things; their contours are dissolved by the night. But this no-thingness is not nothingness; there is left the darkness of night, which fills space and invades us, is within as much as without. The dissolution of contours and boundaries renders whatever dangers the night harbors possible anywhere, everywhere. The deep uneasiness before the unknown that afflicts me does not turn into a recognition that I exist on my own and can, must, act on my own. I would instead overcome, or at least endure, anxiety by seeking support in what is known, though it is now out of reach. Death is ungraspable, unconfrontable; it has no front lines. We do not know that death is nothingness— nothingness is not some thing one knows. But nothingness is what we can long for, out of all the density and suffocating opacity of pain and suffering.

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Dying in Nature Anxiety, Heidegger observes, can be fled or covered over, and it is thus concealed in everyday preoccupations.7 But when we see that death is unmistakably imminent, our existence would be nothing but the dull pounding of anxiety, driving the resolute plunge into nothingness. Yet anthropological research has shown that many people sink calmly and peaceably into death, and many cultures have elaborated practices that help people to die without anxiety. See the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We have had a premonition of this calm. When we go to the forests and the meadows, to mountains and glaciers, when we descend into the coral reefs of the oceans, when we contemplate the movements of the clouds, we find ourselves not in the Heideggerian world of implements and objectives, pathways and obstacles, but in nature. A nature that we are not surveying with a circumspection governed by our interests; our look drifts among beings seeing them as they are, as they exist on their own. There is a dissolution of any governing and integrating force in our consciousness, and the systole and diastole of our consciousness disconnect to exist as pulses of luminous energy picking up the movements of light, patches of shadow, restless leaves, bird calls, sparkles in the water. We lie back in the meadow or in the depth of the coral seas, our postural axis fades out, we give over the support of our trunk and limbs to the ground or to the water, and in our bodies small surges of blood and nutrients and biles go on, in synch with the drafts of breeze, the pulse of sunbeams, the rhythms of the sea. We no longer stand upright to exist and act on our own; we lose our will to make our organisms into self-moving, self-motivating, self-programmed agents; we sink into nature. This experience is a premonition of dying. Of dying in nature, into nature. A dying that seems to us to be the natural destination of our organisms. This destination no longer appears to us to be an inexorable fearful iron fate or a supreme duty we owe to authenticity or to our freedom but the calm movement with which nature flows through time. We have spent days or weeks or months in other cultures sharing with them their experience of going to nature. We have accompanied on camel the Tuareg of the Sahara, whose instrumental complex is reduced to a tent and a few utensils packed in a bag, and spent days in rhythmic movement over ever- drifting sand dunes seeing the footprints of the camels being erased by the winds. We have spent days on small boats with Moken people, the sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea, our bodies and our consciousness filled with nothing but the waves of the sea. We have spent long evenings with the

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never-Christianized Lacandon of the Chiapas rain forest, watching the embers of the fire glow and listening to the basso continuo of frogs and night insects. We have understood how dying for them would not be fraught with Heideggerian anxiety or resoluteness.

See the Corpse Heidegger separates radically my experience of my mortality, the anxiety that reveals my dying as annihilation, from my observation of the death of others. Anxiety reveals to me that my death will be a being cast into nothingness. For me the death of others that I observe (and my death that they observe) is transition from active ex-istence, incessantly projecting a future state of itself and of its field of experience, to the state of a corpse. The corpse is unreservedly present, no longer generating intentions or possibilities. It is utterly present in a world as full as before. Thus holding wakes, going to wakes, is tranquilizing—an insight Heidegger finds in the opening pages of Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych.8 Anthropologists have instead reported in so many communities the outbreak of wild grieving and outrage not only of the loved ones but also of the whole community in the presence of a corpse. In societies subsisting in harsh environments, the Kalahari Desert, the Amazon, the Arctic tundra, the swamps of West Papua, where death is common, a corpse of a fallen warrior or of a child is excruciating for the community. Heidegger defines the corpse as an existence that has turned into simply and utterly present being. But a corpse is a locus of violence. It is an organism where violence has struck, from without or from within, and where violence continues, bacteria, viruses, or tumors having assaulted the homeostasis of the body, releasing toxins that will break out of the organs and cells, contaminating the ground with blood, biles, infectious seepage, and excrement, polluting the air with foul gases. Max Weber argued that the sense of the strange powers at work in a corpse, a fear of the corpse manifested, he says, by other species of animals, is at the origin of the ancient practices of burying or burning corpses and of the later practices of mummifying corpses, providing them with a tolerable existence, giving them offerings of food and drink, preventing them from becoming envious of the possessions enjoyed by the living.9 A corpse arouses horror in us, but we are also drawn to it. The first effect of bloodshed is hatred and the compulsion to shed blood in turn. The sight of the victory of violence in the corpse provokes the will to take on that violence, to wield it as one’s own power. Anthropologists find many societies

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where every death in one’s community produces an active initiative to kill someone practicing sorcery in a hostile community, or just to kill someone, anyone, in that community. Today, without belief in sorcery, the sight of a corpse continues to provoke the violence that requires another corpse—to see crimes of passion, gang battles, wars, torture, capital punishment.

The Corpse I Am Becoming Aging, the growing inertia that weighs on my initiatives, wounds, scars, infections, debilitating diseases, gives me a sense of my mortality. A corpse befouls and pollutes. The intense experience of shed blood, in wounds but also in menstruation, as well as body effluvia, vaginal fluids, semen, mucus discharges, and excrement show me my becoming a corpse. It is striking that from Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych Heidegger only attends to the opening scene— the corpse cleaned, dressed in fine clothing, appearing, at the wake, to have achieved perfect rest, which gives the visitors an increased sense of their own buoyant vitality. But the body of the story is all about the small bruise that Ivan Ilych suffers when he is back at home and that does not heal and the growing pain that finally fills all of his days and nights and that gives him first an inkling, then the appalled recognition of death inexorably coming, already at work in him. Pain is an experience of being riveted to oneself, unable to escape oneself by turning to the outside environment, unable to retreat behind the pain to observe it and deal with it. To suffer the pain is to be unable to turn away from oneself, to look outward, to forget oneself. Suffering is to be mired in pain, mired in one’s own substance. The pain fills one’s substance and smothers the force of the I. It weighs down and chokes one’s initiatives; it depersonalizes. In the unstaunchable progression of the pain, Ivan Ilych experiences the progressive reduction of all his powers toward total prostration. Suffering contains a premonition of one’s death in the guise of the last limit of prostration, materialization, becoming a corpse. There is insight in suffering. What I had heard talk of, what I had conceived, imagined, feared, I now understand. Until I suffered, I did not really know what suffering was. And in suffering I first realize what the suffering of others is; I find myself suffering as all that lives suffers. And suffering and aging give me a premonition of the unrelenting reduction of my powers, prostration, materialization, becoming a corpse. Seeing others struck dead does give me a vision of what pain and aging inwardly announce in me. In suffering and aging I find I am dying as anyone, everyone dies, as everything that lives has to die.

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Voices of the Dead Burial of the dead, which archaeology now dates back at least eighty thousand years, and mummification, which among the Chinchorro peoples of present-day Chile began seven thousand years ago, do not by themselves prove that peoples that did these things with the dead did not regard the dead as Vorhanden to be gotten rid of or as mementos of what no longer exists. But when the dead are found to have been buried or mummified along with utensils, weapons, and foodstuffs, anthropologists recognize these as evidence that for those peoples some of the life forces and powers of those now dead persist in some sort of existence. Ancestors endure in some form and affect the living beneficently. Widespread also is the sense that the dead are resentful of the living and pains must be taken to protect the living from them, to drive them out of the habitat of the living. Heidegger, however, affirms that the death of others that we witness is their transformation to the state of a being utterly present, on hand, Vorhanden, from which their lucid or oblivious future and possibility-ordered existence has utterly vanished. Today theories of communication induce us to depict the others about us as agencies with which we exchange information. But when we actually communicate with people about us, the exchange of information is a small part of our conversation; most of the time we utter words of welcome and camaraderie, give and receive clues and watchwords as to how to behave among them and among others, gossip, talk to, amuse one another. The other is evidently there, a person, for us not as an agency that issues meaningful propositions, information, but as an agency that orders us and appeals to us. This fundamental presence and reality of the other as an agency that appeals to me and orders me can be separated from his or her perceptible presence. A voice uttered at a distance can penetrate to the core of our identity and appeal to us and put demands on us. A child may be ordered by the voice of a parent when that parent is no longer there; an adult may hear that voice when the parent is no longer alive, may hear too the parents of that parent. What in an earlier, evolutionist anthropology was dubbed “animism” recognizes that voices addressing us and ordering us may be the voices of other species and voices of the absent and the dead. Indeed, is there any society where the voice of ancestors is utterly silenced? For us the voices of the dead order us and appeal to us often more forcefully than the voices of the living about us. The voice of our father invalidates the lecherous suggestions of our gang, our cronies, and the opportun-

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ist maxims of our boss. The voice of our grandfather makes us listen still to the cries of the peregrine, the drumming of the ruffed grouse, the voices of the pines and of the aspens in the evening breeze. The voice of Socrates and Hume strip authority from the sententious affirmations of our teacher. The dead also torment us. The voice of a parent who in words or without words said to us from childhood, “I do not love you,” curses us still today, twenty years after he or she died. When our mother or our child dies, we are tormented by all the things that we failed to say.

Dignity

Dignity is not a word we use much. We do talk about people who behave with dignity in certain situations, with the composure and assurance that formal and ceremonial occasions— state dinners, funerals— require. They know the codes. We also speak of people who behave with dignity in crises, when their competence is being attacked. The engineer behaves with dignity when he listens respectfully to all the criticisms being made of his work, knowing that he can answer them. The minister of the environment behaves with dignity when he resigns his cabinet post after the government has resolved to grant the mining companies rights to national parklands. The nurse behaves with dignity when she listens attentively to the patient or the doctor telling her how she bungled her job. It is especially during the ordeal of dying that we speak of dignity and honor it. The dying one is dying; he or she is not reaching for dignity; dignity is not his or her goal. He does not have a goal: he is going no where. He is going without going on. Dying takes time; he is held in the endurance of time. It is not that he extends a field of time, like the person engaged in living who foresees what is ahead, foresees objectives, and foresees the paths and implements and obstacles on this side of those objectives. The dying one foresees nothing, has a premonition of the utterly unknown ahead. This state of death, of the extinction of his life and of the environment his life lights up about him, is not something he confronts. It has no faces and no surfaces and no place. It cannot be located in the succession of moments of time. The last moment is ahead, not yet there, but it is imminent; the next moment may be the last moment. She is enduring a time without a future, a time from which the resources of the past are irrelevant and disconnect. Her lucid recognition of that is lived as patience. Patience is a not just passivity— it is suffering— but it is suffering without grappling for release and

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without recrimination against the past that can no longer offer its forces and resources. Because she knows her time to die has come, because she knows she is dying and awaits what cannot be foreseen or confronted— because she somehow finds, in patience, the strength for this lucidity— she makes no unrealistic demands on the medical staff and does not search for blame in others or in her own past. And it is just that that strikes us as her dignity. But that was not an objective; it is a side effect. Is it not such comportment in the midst of relentless pain, when all his resources are failing, that makes us project the dignity we witness there back over the whole life of such a person? We are unable to witness such a dying without envy, without longing to be able to die that way, when our time comes. It motivates us to wish to live with dignity. We speak of dignity in others— it is even one of the things we are most impelled to point out and talk about when we witness it— but we are reticent to speak of dignity in our own case. Is that not because to invoke dignity for oneself, to say ‘‘I have dignity’’ is to seek to designate a quality that will be in force in one’s subsequent life, whereas dignity is something we first observed in someone who was dying? What we designated there as dignity appeared to us to be something improbable, inexplicable, that emerged in the throes of physical collapse, pain, the impotence of mental skills, the process of definitive and irreversible defeat. The longing that arises in us to be able to die that way surges in us like a hope fraught with the sense of all the laxities, facilities, cowardices, escapisms, illusions, fantasies with which our lives are interwoven. If the spectacle of someone dying with dignity is what motivates us to wish to live with dignity, whether we, in fact, do live with dignity will be known only when the time comes for us to die. If to invoke dignity for oneself is to forfeit it, if dignity cannot be an objective, if it is essentially a side effect of that thing we have to do, to die— to lucidly see that we have fallen into a time that has no objectives, no future— then dignity can only be a secondary effect of undertakings that we engage in that do have objectives. One cannot produce dignity intentionally or willfully; it can only appear as a side effect of aiming at outside objectives, doing other things well.

Irrevocable Loss

Work is launched by envisioning an objective. Putting himself in the future with the objective, the agent segments the environment into hypothetical paths, resources, implements, and obstacles. Work takes time; it executes manipulations in a succession of phases of time. It applies force to subordinate materials and resources to and integrates them into the final objective. What has come to pass does not pass away, is not lost; it is possessed and integrated in the result that is gained. Language may fix an objective for work, and the successive moves of a work may be represented in language. Georges Bataille saw that language has the intentional form of work. Language analyzes, chops up, a thing, situation, or event and lays out its components successively. The sense of the words successively put forth is not present in them; the words that follow one another await their meaning from the future, from the final words of the sentence. The final words retain the succession of words that have already passed and fulfill their meaning that had been in suspense. They reverse the passing of time, recuperate the loss. The end does not close in upon itself, upon its presence; it opens upon more words to situate and fix its significance. “Language,” Bataille says, “cannot isolate an end and say of it, positively, that it is of no use: it cannot keep from inserting that end into an endless circle of propositions where there is never any apogee, where nothing ever stops, where nothing is lost.”1 A performance is an action that is turned to one or more witnesses. And the language that informed the action, that programmed and guided it, now acquires vocative direction and imperative force, addressed to the spectator. In addition, a performance can exhibit nonlinguistic, nonconceptual sense— acceleration, pause, silence, expansion, condensation, elation, blockage— now addressed to the spectator. An action is modified when it also functions

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as a performance; its stages are made more clear and distinct. The action may acquire formal perfection; it is performed with grace and style. In ritual the action that is set forth is not tightly engaged with the material forces in the immediate environment. The pattern of the action can then be meticulously refined. “Ritual,” Claude Lévi-Strauss explained, “makes constant use of two procedures: parceling out [morcellement] and repetition. . . . Ritual makes infinite distinctions and ascribes discriminatory values to the slightest shades of difference.”2 We turn to walk home, and when we set out, our walk contracts a gait— a rhythmic and melodic pattern— that prolongs itself of itself. It can become ritualized, as when we attentively place every other step on a line in the sidewalk or step in three-quarter waltz time. The close association of behavior and language that we see in work and in performance is broken in ritual. The ritualization of our walk may start with no intention formulated; it is not an acting out of a statement. Sigmund Freud noted that we repeat our personal or private rituals with extreme attentiveness to each step, while being unable to say what each step means. Rituals may well include words, words that are not descriptions but invocations and incantations, words of a language no one uses or understands, or vocalisms of no language, that function to accelerate or intensify movement or induce trance states. Actions may become ritualized without language, but then in the gap between the ritual and the real environment is an open space where imagination or visionary states can insert the mythic languages that elaborate other scenes and narratives. The ritual is not a segment of theater, is not an acting out of a preexisting myth; it is an action. Rituals are enacted, Victor Turner explained, to promote and increase fertility of men, crops, and animals, domestic and wild; to cure illness; to avert plague; to obtain success in raiding; to turn boys into men and girls into women; to make chiefs out of commoners; to transform ordinary people into shamans and shamanins; to “cool” those “hot” from the warpath; to ensure the proper succession of seasons and the hunting and agricultural responses of human beings to them.3 Victor Turner was studying collective rituals. His list does not cover all the rituals in our individual lives, does not spell out what our personal or private rituals do. We devoted our whole life to a cause, it gave meaning to everything we did, and the cause has been lost. The words that proclaimed the cause and enlisted us in the cause have become impotent and empty. We are alive still; what can we do with the time that remains? We have lost our lover. Everything that we did we did for and with our lover; every action was also a per-

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formance addressed to our lover; that love remains, grasping the immense void. What can it do? Before our grief, our friends discover the vacuousness of what they say, what anyone can say. And when someone whom we did not love, whom no one loved, is lost, the abyss is yet more terrible, our anguish yet more desolate. Nowhere more than here is language impotent. In the face of irrevocable loss, when work can have no effect, when performance has become absurd in the absence of lover or witness, we may find that our life continues in rituals, rituals that are not acting out of language, that do not give rise to language. What are the rituals doing? In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,4 Colonel Aureliano Buendía had risen to become commander in chief of the revolutionary forces and the man most feared by the government. He had launched thirtytwo armed uprisings that each had been crushed. He had slaughtered uncounted enemy soldiers and noncombatants and led so many of his followers to defeat and death without heroism or legacy. By seventeen different women he had seventeen male children, who, because they were his sons, were one after another hunted down and killed. As the years passed he saw the Conservatives but also the Liberals for whom he fought had abandoned all their principles, fighting only for power. After almost twenty years of war, he signed a treaty with the government putting an end to the insurrection. He returns to the house in which he was born. He gives his military clothing to the orderlies, buries his weapons, and burns the poetry he had written since childhood. He destroys all traces of his passage through the world. He refuses to see anyone. Behind closed doors all day he works making gold figurines, little fish. He links their scales, laminates gills, puts on fins, and fits tiny rubies into their eye sockets. The fish are very small and frail but perfect. At first he sells the little fishes for gold coins and then melts down the coins to make little fish. But when he finds out that people are buying them not as pieces of jewelry but as historic relics, he stops selling them. He keeps on making two fishes a day, and when he finishes twenty-five he melts them down and starts all over again. The attention, the concentration required by the delicacy of his artistry fills the persistence of time and also neutralizes his memories and disconnects his disillusionment with the war. Each little fish is perfect and each movement and moment of making it is perfect and dissolves as each fish is melted down. He is effacing the worth and worthlessness of all his deeds, effacing his very name, in these figurines. He is also effacing the conquest that had founded Columbia. The conquistadors were searching for El Dorado, the Muisca chief who filled a raft

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with gold figurines and covered himself with gold dust and rowed to the center of Lake Guatavita, where he descended into the waters and scattered all the gold objects among the fish of the lake. The conquistadors tortured hundreds of natives to get them to reveal where the gold was mined and stored, and several times enslaved them to drain the lake, without recovering the treasure.5 They decimated Muisca, obliterated their culture and knowledge, such that today nothing remains but a small number of tiny gold figurines whose meaning is lost. Death comes, comes when it will. As it approaches, in sickness or in old age, there is the time of waiting. It is a time when one’s physical and mental powers progressively diminish, when the future that is imminent is the eventuality of total and irreversible impotence. The time of waiting is a stretch of time in which the anticipations, intentions, projects that envision the future lose their meaning and disconnect, a stretch of time in which the past, all the experience, knowledge, and skills of the past lose their meaning, fall away. In the time of waiting one finds oneself in a now that does not pass, that continues, without extending possibilities. Baltimore, where I live, is the home of the American Visionary Art Museum, the first and most important venue for “outsider art” in the United States. Artworks made by people untrained in art, ignorant of the art world, sometimes by people unable to function in society, incarcerated in institutions for the insane. Over the years that I have visited the museum, I have often been struck by the extremely meticulous works made by people suffering from schizophrenia or severe neurological disorders, people with no hope of cure and release, enduring the unending now of their suffering. A whole room, pillows, quilts, bedcovers, curtains, even all the walls covered with sequins, each one sewn with precision in its place. Huge constructions made of toothpicks, 192,000 of them, each one glued with the precision of a jeweler. Filling each now of their unending and hopeless suffering with perfection. About the time when Colonel Aureliano Buendía had returned to the house where he was born, his sister Amaranta began to weave a shroud for Rebeca. In her adolescence Amaranta had fallen in love with Pietro Crespi, who was betrothed to Rebeca. Amaranta had sworn to kill Rebeca before they could marry. But Pietro Crespi did not marry Rebeca, and when he later proposed to Amaranta, she refused him. Unable to move her refusal, he put an end to his life. Years later Colonel Gerineldo Márquez declared his love to her,

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but Amaranta refused him. These two refusals had marked her life, which repeated and prolonged them. Her mother, Úrsula, in her extreme old age and blindness came to see that Amaranta, “whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter,” was the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.6 The hatred was a fear of the wild torments of love, and as love sometimes converts into hatred, hatred sometimes converts into love, both of them possible on the basis of a measureless understanding of solitude. In old age Amaranta was now only waiting for Rebeca to die. “She had decided to restore Rebeca’s corpse, to disguise with paraffin the damage to her face and make a wig for her from the hair of the saints. She would manufacture a beautiful corpse, with the linen shroud and a plush-lined coffin with purple trim, and she would put it at the disposition of the worms with splendid funeral ceremonies. She worked out the plan with such hatred that it made her tremble to think about the scheme, which she would have carried out in exactly the same way if it had been done out of love.”7 As she worked, the attention and concentration spent on each stitch made each of her memories more scalding. Then one day death appears to her in an apparition and orders her to begin sewing her own shroud. “She was authorized to make it as complicated and as fine as she wanted but just as honestly executed as Rebeca’s, and she was told that she would die without pain, fear, or bitterness at dusk on the day that she finished it.”8 All her waking hours Amaranta works on her shroud; all her nights she dreams of the shroud. Sometimes after her dreams she unravels what she had woven to design it anew. It will be the most perfect, the most beautiful shroud every woven. Over four years she works; each thread, each now absorbs her attention completely. The time span of the weaving is not like the time span of a work, making a shelter or a tool or utensil, which opens upon a future time of possibility. The time span of the weaving is the dead time of the present whose past has fallen away, that prolongs itself into another thread, another now. A time of perfection,

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what is accomplished neither requiring anything further nor making possible anything different. “The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it would have still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke without trembling Pietro Crespi’s smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude.”9 The shroud is not a representation of her life but the meticulous and unremitting effacement of the bitterness of her life. Weaving the shroud is not a performance, addressed to witnesses. The shroud is not an artwork that will enshrine her in immortality; it will be buried with her. Intensely present to us are those we love. Holding the beloved’s hands, his or her substance supports us, the pulse of his or her life throbs in our body. Caressing the beloved, we feel the beloved’s pleasure in our pleasure. But denuded, abandoned in our arms, the beloved remains distant. Our caresses pass repetitively and aimlessly over the beloved, having no idea what they are searching for. Love is symbiosis with someone who remains alien and exotic. The beloved denuded, exposed, abandoned to us, is also exposed to the harsh edges of the world and wounding, exposed to deceits and disillusionments, offenses, and insults. Love is wonder before the force of life in another, inseparable from anxiety over the frailty, the vulnerability of the beloved. Love is affection, passion, abandon, pulsing with readiness to act. Love dilates, swells, expands, can become the strongest of the intentions and drives in our life, its energies pouring into all our initiatives and undertakings. When we love someone, there is somewhere deep inside us the terrible realization that one of us will one day be confronted with the death of the other. A death that we cannot understand. None of the world’s reasons— the reasons in force in machinery that crushed him or her, the reasons in microbes— make rational the obliteration of the one we loved and who incessantly supplied reasons to live and to speak and to act. We cannot represent the reasons for his or her death and cannot represent the abyss left by his or her death. Disconsolate, we mourn. Mourning seems to be concentration on the one we loved and who is no more. But Sigmund Freud saw in mourning a work that transfers our libido stage by stage upon other love objects. A pain-

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ful work that has to be carried out over a long stretch of time. We have to mourn; this work is enjoined as the method to cease to love the one who is no more. But we do not, and do not wish to, cease to love the one who has disappeared. From the beginning our love is attachment to all that is remote, inaccessible, absent in the one who is there. Now in mourning our love for the one who has disappeared continues. But action with and for the beloved and performance in view of the beloved are no longer possible. What can the force of this love do? On that day Michael and Kelly had been married twenty-two months. On that day Michael was in Montreal. On that day, a hundred miles away, Kelly was the only one killed in a three-car collision. On that day Kelly was killed in a three-car collision. Michael looked down at the coffin in the grave. Kelly was a black void. Michael’s mind was a black void. His young life, sent forth to a radiant working and loving future was a black void. The funeral rite was accomplished; one after another the people touched Michael, sometimes tried to murmur something that did not register in Michael’s mind, one after another they left. Nobody ventured to try to bring Michael away— for what? To do what? To say what? Michael became aware that the gravedigger was there, with shovels. He timidly began his work. The shovels of earth fell upon Kelly’s coffin, covering her forever with darkness. The gravedigger, a stranger. Michael without thinking took a shovel and together they filled the grave with earth, with darkness. Michael lost his mind. Thoughts pick up the layout of the world, pick up possibilities, envision goals and reasons and paths and means. Thoughts formed in Michael’s mind only to shudder and blur their lines and break against one another without being able to activate Michael. Feelings churned in a pit of darkness. One day, a month later, Michael’s mind was filled with hallucinations. Hallucinations of being there, with Kelly, seeing her stiffen, cry out, stomp her foot on the brake, seeing the car scream and buckle, seeing her body crushed, seeing her breath, her life escape her. Every day, all day, there was nothing in Michael’s mind but the hallucinations. Michael did not seek counseling. He had never been afraid of the imagination. Then one day, three weeks later, the hallucinations were not there. They did not return. One day Michael had gone on his bicycle to Kelly’s grave. Afterward, he

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did not return to his apartment. He headed east. Alone, on his bike. Two months later he reached the Atlantic coast. Then he took a plane to Vancouver on the Pacific coast and headed back east on his bike. Back to Kelly’s grave. He biked for a year, alone, ten thousand kilometers. To set out on a bicycle trip for weeks, for months, interrupting one’s life, one’s work, is not an initiative with a plan and a purpose. Young people sometimes do it, with a buddy; we fit it into our thinking in terms of purpose and goal; we say to ourselves they are building up their bodies, exploring their strengths, discovering the wider world. We hear of adults who are crossing the continent or the world on a bike for a cause, to promote international brotherhood or peace or to raise money for children with AIDS. The goal, the purpose, always looks makeshift, added on. We who are committed to a job or a profession cannot really understand them; we can only imagine they are different, we cannot imagine ourselves doing that. Michael had no cause, no goal or purpose. It was not something he was doing for Kelly; Kelly was lost forever in the black void. To pump the bike for ten thousand kilometers makes one completely physical. Consciousness exists now in the tensions and the relaxing of the muscles, in the feeling of strength and in the fatigue. Consciousness exists on the surfaces of the body, all sensitive to the sun, the wind, the cold, the rain. A consciousness that excludes thinking, remembering, envisioning works and ambitions. The road without destination rising and descending, kilometer after kilometer. There is no planning the day ahead; who knows what the weather will be, what the road will be. The end of the day one sinks heavily into dark sleep. Our place is a retreat or refuge that we have appropriated; where Michael stopped for the night was a place forthwith to leave. The open road drew movement into him. Stretches of the road rose in relief, throbbing with speed or tranquility, with ardor and exhilaration. Sometimes the landscape opened upon vistas glistening with dew and birdsong. Sometimes physical fatigue blurred the eyes, the landscape dissolved into green dust. Nature was surfacing with its assembled trees and wayward clouds, the dull rumble of thunder and the frenzied rage of lightning, the poised pause of deer and soft-furred scurrying animals, the birds sprinting and calling to him without him understanding their calls. Over ten thousand kilometers, nature was tunneling into him in his strong breathing, strong pushing, strong feeling, strong forcing, strong dancing, strong singing-out. He felt nature guiding his body and felt an intensity of trust that he had never known before. The sun and the breeze fueled his body. He was a body in nature, like a hare in the prairie, a bird in the sky. Michael carried a GPS that continually mapped the road with abstract in-

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tersections of longitude and latitude, but evenings when he looked through his book of maps he saw stretches of space pooling with the white of emptiness and desolation and the green of pounding energies, spread with the ochre of plenitude and the ashes of loneliness. Then one day, in Saskatchewan, he stopped in a little gas and food station far from any town for breakfast. Hear him tell it: I had already been riding for about three hours that morning and managed to cover about seventy-five miles. As I was rummaging through my gear to find my wallet for my breakfast, a man about sixty-five years of age approached me and began asking me questions about my bicycle. He and his wife had just pulled into the gas-bar to have breakfast too. They were heading to Alberta from Ontario. I asked them where they were from in Ontario; they said they were from Perkinsfield. The man added that he’d doubted that I would have ever heard of Perkinsfield. I laughed and told him that my family’s summer home was in Perkinsfield and that I was married in St. Patrick’s Church, which is in the centre of the community; naturally he knew the church. We went inside and ate our breakfast together. The gentlemen asked me if my wife minded that I was away from home for so long while riding my bike across the country. I told them that Kelly had died a year ago in an automobile accident at the intersections of highway 12 and country road 6 (incidentally located in Perkinsfield as well). Immediately the man said to me, “You’re that poor woman’s husband?!” It all came as a shock that this gentleman had made such a knowing statement to me concerning Kelly’s death. I held my breath waiting for what he was going to say to me next. He told me that he was driving home from the grocery store in Perkinsfield when he came upon the accident in which Kelly had been killed, only moments after the collision. He got out of his car to see if he could be of any assistance, but he could tell that Kelly was badly injured. In a few moments the emergency vehicle arrived and Kelly was taken to the hospital. We were all there in tears going through this short recollection of events that had had such an effect on us each. Jake had lived in Perkinsfield his entire life. I had been going there to our cottage for thirty-five years. His home was only one kilometer from where my parent’s cottage was and we had never crossed paths before this moment.

There is the linear time of geology and astronomy and the linear time of history, and there is the time of each of us that is our lifetime. It is the

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time of our birth, infancy, growing up, education, engaging in a work or a profession, a family. It is the time of practical life, of work, and performance, where what has come to pass is possessed and integrated in results that are gained, where language reverses the passing of time, recuperates the loss. We measure the time of childhood, adolescence, and education in years; we measure the day in working hours and tasks in minutes. An automobile accident, a death throws Michael outside of this time, into the incalculable time of chance, of fate. A time that does not advance by measurable units, that is not progressive, that is a limitless stretch of duration in which events happen, themselves chance events, fateful events. The time when Kelly was struck is not a time when what is detached is reassembled, when what is torn down is rebuilt; it is a time when loss is absolute, time of the irrevocable. The time of the bike ride is a stretch of duration without achievement or accomplishment. It is not a time of returning to action, to work, and language. It is not a time of the work of mourning, a work, according to Freud, of Michael detaching his libido from Kelly and attaching it to other objects. It is a time in which all the strength of Michael’s love holds fast, without the possibility for action or performance, held before the void. It is a time in which, inconceivably, Michael finds Kelly again— finds the irrevocable loss of Kelly again. First, in the three weeks of hallucinations of being with her in the crash. And then in a chance encounter thousands of kilometers later with Jake who, in Michael’s place, was there when Kelly died. It happened that I was in Edmonton, where I gave some talks. At the end of my stay Michael came up to me with a thick volume of maps of regions across Canada painted in intense emotional colors. He called the book The Atlas and told me it was the map of his bike ride. What I saw there were words written across the pages, words whose significance I did not grasp, words not addressed to others. Michael said that there was no time for me to read it now, that rather he wanted to read it to me one day. He asked me to write something on the Edmonton page. I trembled over the idea of my writing something on his great map and calendar of his journey in a time flowing into rivers and lakes and mountains of emotion but could not refuse. I sought for humble words to acknowledge and affirm the map of his journey determined and desperate, in the time of fate and irrevocable loss. How little did I then, and how little do I now, understand the words I wrote. We walk with others, we work with others. The words of others inform the objectives, paths, implements, and obstacles of our work and the inner diagram of our initiatives. When death claims our collaborator, we continue

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his or her walk, his or her work. We have taken up the projects, intentions, values, dreams of our parents. Our minds have taken up and made live again the intuitions and probings of thinkers dead centuries ago. Our eyes have shaped what we see with the exalted and anguished eyes of artists and seers. Our throats have sung chants of ancient bards and songs of vocalists our parents had loved and ballads of people in remote lands. We have continued the walks of Henry David Thoreau in Massachusetts and John Muir in the Sierra Nevada. To walk with others, to work with someone is to be there to aid, support, protect him or her and to nurse his or her wounds. It is also to be there when he or she is dying, to accompany him or her who is going no where. It is to accompany him or her so that he or she does not die alone. It is not because someone has given us strength and skill and language and knowledge and collaborated with us that now we must accompany him when his strengths are failing, his experience and skill are falling away, when he is drifting to death where there is nothing to say. We must be there, accompany the one who was never our collaborator, whom we did not love, whom no one loved, now that he is going no where. A society where we would no longer care for one another in our vulnerability undermines itself. A society in which we would leave the dying to die alone, in which we would no longer accompany those who are going no where, empties itself. A port exists as a passage to elsewhere. I was reading about Trieste. I had never been there, but it sounded not like a place one goes to but a place one goes from. Trieste was a free commune in the twelfth century, from 1327 the sole port of Austria and from 1867 of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Annexed to Italy in 1920. Allied bombings during World War II destroyed the shipyards and the industrial section of the city. Trieste was chartered as an independent city-state under United Nations protection in 1947. But seven years later the city-state was divided, and Italy and Yugoslavia each annexed a part. The city proper was predominantly Italian speaking, the suburbs and surrounding towns predominantly Slovenian; there were also smaller numbers of Germans, Croatians, Serbs, Czechs, Istro-Romanians, and Jews. I had been to Australia. They say there are two hundred different ethnic groups in Australia, besides the aboriginal population, now but 2.5 percent of the total. After World War II, the Australian government launched a massive immigration program, believing that having narrowly avoided a Japanese invasion, Australia must “populate or perish.” Since 1945 seven million people have immigrated to Australia. One out of four of Australia’s

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today 22.6 million people were born elsewhere. Mary, who lives in Sydney, is the daughter of Greek immigrant parents. She wrote to tell me that her friend Domenico de Clario would be in Baltimore and suggested we meet. Domenico, she said, is an artist. He makes paintings, drawings, assemblages, text performances, site- specific and installation art, and piano performances. Many of these visual and musical works are made with Domenico blindfolded. Domenico came to my home. A man of average height, in his sixties, shaven head, a handsome and very mobile face, Aussie accent. I asked him if he had been born in Australia. “It’s hard to find somebody born in Australia,” he laughed. He told me he had been born in Trieste and asked what about me. I said my parents had emigrated from Lithuania. I grew up on a farm in Illinois. A small farm that my father worked with the tools and doggedness of a peasant. Domenico said he was born in 1947 in Trieste. In a one-bedroom apartment that housed his parents, grandparents, and sister. In 1956 he and his family boarded a ship bound for Australia. When they arrived, they were taken to a holding camp in a former military barracks. After six weeks a job was located for his father and they moved to the Italian quarter in Melbourne. Domenico said he studied architecture and town planning in Melbourne but left without completing a degree. When he was twenty, he returned to Italy to study painting in Milan for a year. Over the years he was able to teach painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation in Melbourne. And make his art. I asked him what work he was doing now. He said he had translated Calvino’s Invisible Cities into English, Triestine, and music, and, in a lane behind his house each evening at dusk over fifty-six consecutive days, he improvised music for it and presented two stories, one recounting a journey he had made and the other describing a house somewhere in the world he wanted to live in. He presented the work for a Ph.D. in art at Melbourne’s Victoria University in 2001. “So I finally got a degree,” he smiled. We sat on the back deck, with glasses of the Italian wine he had brought, looking out upon my big back yard dense with bushes and trees. I said I planted all that; there had been nothing but grass when I moved here. Probably some urge to get out of the city, to go back to the country where I was a boy. “I was nine years old when I left Trieste,” he said. “The freighter that had somehow survived the war was very old. It was overcrowded to an extent that would not be allowed today. People were sleeping in the corridors, on the deck. They had brought sacks with all their possessions. They were leaving

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their homelands, their families and friends forever. Most of them had only a distant relative or friend from years ago waiting for them in Australia. We were forty-two days at sea. June and July; the summer heat, the small meals, bad food— people got in one another’s way, quarreled, couldn’t sleep, got sick.” Domenico was silent for a moment and frowned. “One guy was really losing it. Middle-aged, seemed to be alone, nobody knew who he was. He would lean over the deck moaning loudly and stomp back and forth for hours muttering. We finally arrived at Perth. Some people got off. This man pushed against the immigration officials who had come to meet the ship and shouted that he was going to Melbourne. They said the ship was going on to Melbourne. He mumbled miserably that he could not endure the ship any longer. Finally they took him to the immigration camp. “Some months later we in the immigration camp in Melbourne learned that he had escaped and headed on foot for Melbourne. It is thirty-four hundred kilometers from Perth to Melbourne. We learned that he had made it about a third of the way and then perished of exposure.” Domenico looked out over the back yard into the distance. After some moments he looked back at me. “Four years ago my parents had some people over who had been on that ship fifty years ago. They exchanged memories and at one point remembered that man. And I started to think of him again. A few weeks later I went to the library to search out the newspapers from that year. Finally I found a small notice in one newspaper. It mentioned the place where his body was found. “A few weeks after that I packed a backpack and took the bus to that place. It’s a flat empty stretch, desert all around. Then I started walking. I walked for ten days, then went back to my job. Anyhow I was not trying to reach Melbourne for him. I was just walking with him. “Then the next year I went back to the place where I had left off, to continue the walk. Another ten days. Last year I again went back, to continue his walk.”

PA R T V I I

Gratitude

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Gratitude

Gratitude is an action. Giving thanks. When someone arrives with a bottle of wine, we look at its color in the candlelight, savor its perfume, pour its ruby flow into our best glasses, pour it for all our guests before we fill our glass. When someone gives us a gift, we do not just put it on a shelf and sit down to talk about whatever. We receive the gift, it takes time, we take it with both hands, take it in with our eyes, turn it about, contemplate its features. And we show it, share it with others. Easter week on the Côte d’Azur, the year that I was teaching at the Université de Nice. Chris had taken a break from her studies and had come to spend two weeks with me. Nice was filled with thousands of Parisians who had come to escape the dreary end of the Parisian winter on the Mediterranean coast. But, quite untypically, it was raining here, steady unending rain day after day, and the Parisians were gloomily drinking bottle after bottle of wine in the cafés and restaurants. I had an old VW bug and I said to Chris: “Why fight it? Let’s go up into the rain!” We put on coats with parkas and got into the car. Chris’s guitar was in the back seat. We headed into the Maritime Alps that rise abruptly to ice-covered summits behind the city. I was driving at random, just going up, and at a certain moment noticed a dirt road and drove up it. After some twenty minutes it ended at a stone wall some twelve feet high, over which we saw some rooftops. “It’s a fortified village,” I said. “It must date from the sixteenth century when the Mediterranean was patrolled by Saracen pirates.” We got out of the car; the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle. We found the gate in the wall; inside there were some twenty stone houses. Here and there, there were breaks in the roofs where the tiles had been blown off and broken. “It’s deserted!” Chris exclaimed. We wandered down the lanes and came upon a chapel; we were able to push open the door.

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Inside, on one wall there were naïve frescoes. We were silenced, and Chris seated herself on the floor facing the simple stone altar. After a while I walked outside and wandered to where the terrain was highest. Black clouds were rolling over the ice-covered mountain peaks and furling down between them like ink dropped into water. From time to time there were bolts of lightning that blazed across the ice sheets. Then I looked down, and far below a break in the clouds had opened a shaft of light under which the Mediterranean blue sparkled silver. My body standing there felt awkward, unworthy of the grandiose heights, and instinctually settled to the ground. As it did, my body composed itself in a yoga asana. My eyes gazed quietly into the distances, and from time to time my body shifted into one or another of the simple yoga asanas that I had learned. My mind was emptied of everything but the black clouds and the glaciers. After perhaps an hour or so I got up and wandered down the lanes of the village. On the other end of the village I came upon Chris, seated on a rock softly and intently playing her guitar. We had separately realized what a grandiose gift our eyes had been given and felt the need to do something to receive it, something modestly worthy of it. When it was dark, we drove back down in silence. Back in my apartment, we made sandwiches and opened a bottle of wine. After, Chris took up her guitar again, and I heard her strumming like she had played on the mountain. I wanted to write about this scene, which was, I thought, the most grandiose my eyes had been given to see. I wrote about it to a friend. As I wrote I saw the words were making the scene more intense to me and settling it deeper into my heart. My letter took a long time, with many crossings-out and rephrasings. I realized that I could not share the event on the mountains unless I wrote as well as I could. It was then that I realized that thought— which is about data, about some things or events that are given, which comprehends, takes in, what is given, ponders it, feels its weight, and produces words that are understandable and open to others, that exist for others— thought is gratitude.

APPENDIX

Philosophy’s Tasks

1. Overall Philosophical Justifications The realm of beauty is bigger.— As we go about in nature, with joy and cunning, bent on discovering and as it were catching in the act the beauty proper to everything; as we try to see how that piece of coastline, with its rocks, inlets, olive trees and pines, attains to its perfection and mastery whether in the sunshine, or when the sky is stormy, or when twilight has almost gone; so we ought to go about among men, viewing and discovering them, showing them their good and evil, so that they shall behold their own proper beauty which unfolds itself in one case in the sunlight, in another amid storms, and in a third only when night is falling and the sky is full of rain. Is it then forbidden to enjoy the evil man as a wild landscape possessing its own bold lineaments and effects of light, if the same man appears in our eyes as a sketch and caricature and, as a blot in nature, causes us pain, when he poses as good and law-abiding?— Yes, it is forbidden, hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good— a fact that sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone!— As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty and many of them have not yet been discovered. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak1 Embark!— Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking: he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth,

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blessings, and fertility on him; it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it refashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end one exclaims: How I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them. We must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it. What these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins; what is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword. And new philosophers. The moral earth, too, is round. The moral earth, too, has its antipodes. The antipodes, too, have the right to exist. There is yet another world to be discovered and more than one. Embark, philosophers! —Nietzsche, The Gay Science2

The poets Homer, Sophocles, and Aeschylus worked to consecrate with value terms the founders, heroes, and statesmen. Socrates and Aristotle participated in the way of living and thinking of statesmen, Socrates as military commander, Aristotle as court advisor. Philosophers Socrates and Aristotle elaborated an overall justification of their way of living and thinking. They employed dialectics to refute objections. Hitherto philosophers’ work had been to affirm and consecrate one kind of individual— the rational and also civic and moral individual. Nietzsche envisions a work of creating values that consecrate many kinds of life. Value terms do not simply designate and classify; they affirm and consecrate. They are themselves forces. They have exclamatory form. They do not simply report observable properties or qualities veridically or falsely; they isolate and intensify. The strong words strengthen, the bold words give heart, healthy words invigorate, the beautiful words enhance; the weak words debilitate, the sick words infect, the ugly words sully. The strong exclaim, “How happy I am!” and become yet more happy; they exclaim, “How healthy I am!” and with these words excess energies surge; they exclaim, “How beautiful I am!” and become graceful, stately, radiant. More than affirming values, let the philosopher elaborate an overall justification of each way of living and thinking. Let his discourse be taken on by those whose way of living and thinking the philosopher has justified.

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Zarathustra’s life lived in overcoming induces his disciples to assume the values he puts on them. Philosophical justification has powerful effects on those whom it justifies; they become self-sufficient and independent of praise or blame, energized and turned to nurture what is individual in them. There will, secondarily, be propitious effects on the philosopher and on us. Malice arises in resentment, but happiness is radiant, gratuitously extending its light and warmth in its environment.3 In the inner sense of surging energies, in his happiness, the justified one acts in good will. Nietzsche finds that positive, affirmative values were produced by the Roman, Arabic, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings.4 He affirms and consecrates for his times the values historically produced by these people: “Pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberance, splendid animality, the instincts that delight in war and conquest, the deification of passion, of revenge, of cunning, of anger, of voluptuousness, of adventure, of knowledge.”5 The weak react against these values, branding them dangerous, destructive, evil. They value self-control and self-denial. Nietzsche despised the reactive values of the weak and saw in them the forces that produce the degeneration of modern civilization. But there are passages in which he recognized and affirmed their values.6 In the conclusion of On the Genealogy of Morals he explains that the ascetic ideal, though it expresses a will powerfully turned against life, nonetheless affirms and consecrates the will in lives whose impotence and oppression would otherwise lead to loss of the will to live.7 In the midst of his militant atheism Nietzsche nonetheless recognized the positive effect of religious values upon the religious. “Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings.” They transfigure, ennoble, and beautify.8 In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche set out to produce “a metaphysics for artists,” an understanding and justification of artists. Aristotle had written an aesthetics of the spectator, as did Kant. Nietzsche showed that the Dionysian tragic theater gives the participants metaphysical consolation for their death, giving them the experience of taking on and abandoning identities in turn, participating in the cosmic process, which creates and destroys forms while maintaining its primal force. Ultimately “an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking” would have to be elaborated for each individual— each would have to create it for him- or herself. “Fundamentally, all of our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique and infinitely individual.”9 In our culture, while philosophers continue to produce an overall philo-

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sophical justification of the rational and civic individual, historians, biographers, news reports, literature, and cinema produce overall representations that justify many ways of thinking and living, including lives of violence. Should not philosophers join in their work? Overall Philosophical Justification of the Evil Nietzsche calls for philosophers to contrive words that affirm, justify, and consecrate the violent, the wicked, the evil. “Life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character.”10 Violence belongs to our animal nature.11 “We consider passion a privilege, we consider nothing great unless it includes a great crime; we conceive all being-great as a placing-oneself-outside as far as morality is concerned.”12 As violence issues as a release of excess energies, it is pleasurable. “Wickedness does not have the suffering of another as such as its objective, but our own enjoyment, for example the enjoyment of the feeling of revenge or of a powerful excitation of the nerves.”13 In every war, however incoherent its cause, however unlikely its success, men and women rush to commit themselves to it, even when it has become evident that the cause is lost. Pleasure draws men and women into armies where extreme violence can be unleashed. Recently war correspondent Chris Hedges observed, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug. It is peddled by mythmakers— historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state— all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”14 The overall philosophical justification, if assumed by the evil ones, makes them independent of praise or blame, self-sufficient, happy.15 This gift the philosopher gives the evil is also a gift given to the philosopher and to us who associate with him. It enables him and us to enjoy the grotesque and dark beauty of the violent. It will free the violent from grief and chagrin toward us. It enables us to benefit from their consequent good will, their leading all their own, and our, energies to bloom and ripen. Nietzsche contrasts this with effects of negative valuation put on the violent. Our society aims to afflict guilt on criminals, to impress it on them with punishment. Nietzsche observes that “punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens

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the power of resistance.”16 Extreme punishment can bring about miserable prostration and self-abasement. Ranking Ways of Thinking and Living Anthropologist Ruth Benedict observed that trance is quite common in Bali, where the culture has elaborated a place and significance for it. Medieval European culture also elaborated a place and significance for it, and many individuals had aptitude for trance. In our culture it is relegated to abnormal behavior, and not even psychiatry has elaborated an extensive study and understanding of it; the aptitude for trance is not developed in individuals or develops in asocial forms.17 There are artist cultures, the Nuba, the Toraja, the Balinese. There are warrior cultures, head-hunting cultures, also cultures where what we call greed, vindictiveness, and paranoia have become dominant values of a culture celebrated not only in words but also in images and ceremonies. Anthropologists can cite adequate research to show that every human trait that is consigned to the abnormal in contemporary Western culture has been given value and a significant place by some culture or other. Among the Ilongots of Luzon every young man is expected to behead someone in order to acquire adult status and marry.18 Joel Robbins has documented the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, who, never directly missionized, abandoned their traditional culture for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness.19 Benedict says that modern Western culture honors ego gratification to a degree that in other cultures would be seen as abnormal.20 However, Benedict argues that no culture can elaborate “an overall philosophical justification” of every way of living and thinking. No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior. Just as there are great numbers of possible phonetic articulations, and the possibility of language depends on a selection and standardization of a few of these in order that speech communication may be possible at all, so the possibility of organized behavior of every sort, from the fashions of local dress and houses to the dicta of a people’s ethics and religion, depends upon a similar selection among the possible behavior traits. In the field of recognized economic obligations or sex taboos, this selection is as nonrational and subconscious a process as it is in the field of phonetics. It is a process which goes on in the group for long periods of time and is historically conditioned by innumerable accidents of isolation or of contact of peoples.21

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Is it possible to credit one society’s concept of normal and abnormal behavior over others? Or, out of reliable psychiatric data from many cultures, to identify abnormal human behavior in some absolute sense? Benedict affirms the possibility of a ranking of cultures when the requisite data are reliably gathered from a significant number of them. In ethics, “it is quite possible that a modicum of what is considered right and what wrong could be disentangled that is shared by the whole human race.”22 Nietzsche proposed to affirm, put value on, and promote all the ways of thinking and living inherent in human nature. “I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. . . . I wish to be only a yes-sayer.”23 But he also pursues a genealogical investigation of different kinds of forces that produce different values. He finds that the values of the strong are positive and affirmative and that they affirm forces of health and life that are affirmative and selfaffirmative. This is already to employ the language of values on values, to ask: What is the value of these values?24 The response does not depend on an order outside of them— the welfare of the human community, the rational order of the universe. Nietzsche’s reaction against the ascetic values of the weak confirms their reactive and negative form, expressing a form of life turned against itself. The weak suffer the blows of blind fate and also the oppression of the strong. Unable to meet and parry the blows of the strong at the time, they evoke them in image and denigrate them in image. They combat them with cunning, deviousness, subterfuge, and above all by creating a value system that condemns strength, health and instinct and values dialectics and ascetic practices. “The evil of the strong harms others without giving thought to it: it has to discharge itself; the evil of the weak wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused.”25 It is the weak who pursue destruction for its own sake.26 The genealogical research arrives at the questions, What is the value— not for society but for life, for the enhancement of life— of these values? What is the value for the enhancement of life of the violence that gangs, police, soldiers value? What is the value of the enhancement of life of the violence that sportsmen, hunters, crowds value? Nietzsche had explained that the violent are violent out of pleasure; how does the affirmation and consecration of this violence transform it into “happiness and good will”? Nietzsche several times explained how the victors in the pleasure of their victory become magnanimous and merciful. But he found in that magnanimity not good will but exhaustion of the pleasure

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of victory and nausea.27 Violence is plunder, pillage, rape, murder, torture; how does a positive evaluation put on that refashion it into good? Nietzsche saw in ascetic ideals life turning aggressively against itself. There is also the violence turned on oneself in alcoholics, drug addicts, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Musil’s man without qualities. How, we ask, does an overall justification of this violence transform it into “happiness and good will”? Nietzsche’s response: “We may not suppose that the instinct of life contemplates or intends any sort of cure.”28

2. Mad Discourse In the 1961 preface to his History of Madness,29 Michel Foucault outlined a program for understanding the established rational culture of the West as a function of a series of exclusions. Optimistic, theoretical, dialectical, Socratic culture was constituted, Nietzsche had argued, in opposition to the older tragic, theatrical, participationist, ritual Dionysian culture.30 From the beginning Western culture separated from and excluded the Orient despite all the contact with the culture of the Middle East and Far East. This exclusion remained in force through the colonial period when Europe imposed its domination across much of the planet. Dreams figure integrally in many other cultures— for “man cannot prevent himself from questioning [dreams] in search of his own truth— be that of his destiny or that of his heart.”31 Western knowledge excludes dreams as apparitions of unreality. Western culture was shaped by a division in the realm of pleasures and eroticism and the exclusion of a major part of both. Western reason was delimited by the exclusion of madness. These exclusions were not only conceptual or discursive operations; they were inseparably operations of force. The Orient is excluded by military operations and colonial domination; libertinage and madness are confined behind bars and walls. Philosophers can study the procedures by which the excluded discourses are constituted, procedures distinctive to each kind of discourse. Do such studies issue in validating the excluded discourses, bring them into the realm of what we understand and the ways we understand? Exclusion of Madness A cosmic, tragic vision of madness, Michel Foucault shows, prevailed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The unpredictable, incomprehensible outbreaks,

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bestial frenzy, and roaring destructiveness of madness were seen in the world and in nature, and in the lurching of time and the end of time. Humans are engulfed in a madness that erupts from cosmic abysses. In the fourteenth century cities began to drive out the mad, embark them on ships to be put off far away. In the seventeenth century they were interned in workhouses along with criminals, libertines, vagabonds, and the destitute; in the eighteenth century they were confined in asylums built for them alone. Madness was no longer perceived at large in the cosmos but confined within the mad. What was excluded as madness were certain kinds of behavior and actions— unsettled, disordered, antisocial, irreligious, violent, murderous behavior, witchcraft, alchemy— and certain kinds of language— senseless verbiage, libertinage, impiety, and blasphemy. With these operations of force the mad were no longer heard, were silenced, and finally objectified as cases observed by doctors. Foucault came upon thousands of pages written by Thorin, an almost illiterate lackey and “frenzied madman,” at the close of the seventeenth century, that had been put aside and forgotten.32 But little remains of whatever writings the mad produced. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Foucault exhibits not writings by the mad but writings about them— narratives recounting a Ship of Fools, texts of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare— and paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Thierry Bouts, Albrecht Dürer, and Matthias Grünewald. There are stretches of madness in the writings, as in the lives, of Torquato Tasso, Jonathan Swift, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Literature and delirium are in conflict in their works. In the modern period a growing number of writers, painters, and musicians have fallen into madness; Foucault mentions Friedrich Hölderlin, Gérard de Nerval, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Roussel, and Vincent van Gogh. Their writings belong to our language, and we have come to speak and think in their words. Foucault declares that there is no madness in their works; madness broke off their work. Literature Manquée In the nineteenth century psychiatry assiduously observed the behavior and talk of the mad and elaborated a discourse about them, a discourse of reason about the irrational. Madness had been recognized in pseudowords not constructed according to the paradigms of the vocabulary of a given language, ungrammatical expressions, libertinage and blasphemy, and expressions of behavior that society takes to be intolerable. Setting aside such criteria,

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psychoanalysis constituted the delirium of the mad as discourse. Freud finds that in the discourse of his patients terms and expressions with their fixed meanings in common language are given another, or any other meaning, by a secret code. His patients take them as blanks to which any meaning could be assigned—“which,” Foucault notes, “strictly speaking, says nothing.”33 The esoteric discourse of the mad, he says, does not constitute an oeuvre. Stéphane Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, and Antonin Artaud had, Foucault observes, introduced a new concept of literature in our culture. Before, writers wrote in the common language, on essential subjects and with striking images and skilled rhetoric. Now what makes writings literature is not a specific subject matter or distinctive linguistic resources to convey a subject but the exercise of a sovereign power to modify the values and meanings of the language.34 Literature is a language that “is circumscribed, held sacred, feared, erected vertically above itself, reflecting itself in a useless and transgressive Fold.”35 This literature is not understood as we understand other languages; it requires the methods of literary criticism. Foucault finds what psychoanalysis understands as mad discourse to be akin to what literature since Mallarmé has become, except that the inner code in literature stabilizes into a work, while that of mad discourse loses itself in the labile multiplicity of meanings. A “thousand other cultures” perceived the madman as someone transformed into animal existence or possessed by a leopard, eagle, or cobra; or possessed by deities or demons; or speaking chthonian or empyrean oracles and wisdom. They put “together ‘I am mad’ with ‘I am an animal’ or ‘I am God’ or ‘I am a sign’ or even ‘I am a truth.’”36 Our contemporary culture has put together “I write” and “I am delirious.” Psychiatry had taken the utterances of the mad as symptoms of disordered drives and complexes, symptoms of mental illness. Foucault puts the discourse of the mad in the field of literature, takes it as literature manquée. He foresees a time not so distant when the abnormal organic conditions of people now classified as mentally ill will be righted by pharmacology and their unadapted and violent behavior neutralized by drugs or other behavioral modification methods. Some behaviors now categorized as abnormal may well be included in the multitude of behaviors that constitute our coexistence, our society. The concept of mental illness will fall into disuse. What will then become of their discourse? The conception we now have of it out of psychoanalysis— which Foucault characterized as an esoteric language that fails to become an oeuvre— will lose its force. What it will then be “cannot yet be named.”37

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Madness That Speaks From the beginning of his work Foucault gives us a formal account of mad discourse: in it there is the absence of an oeuvre. It has the form of a language in the common code that harbors another code, which does not stabilize another language but destabilizes all meanings in an emptiness. Foucault does not restore for our reading what was excluded. For what was excluded was not a discourse that was silenced; what was excluded was a silence. Foucault does not specify what constitutes an oeuvre. Are there formal determinations— coherent vocabulary, grammaticality, thematic coherence? We have seen in literature and in painting that as soon as the traits of what is art and what is literature are identified, they are overturned. We have seen paintings where conception and intention were deliberately banished, the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu, the chance productions of John Cage and the surrealists accepted as art; we have seen cadavre exquis and letterism accepted as poetry. Foucault sees mad discourse to be governed by a secret code that makes terms and expression mean anything and therefore nothing, but mad discourse does have content in the Middle Ages, where it experiences and depicts a tragic cosmic disorder, violence, bestiality, destruction that pervades the world and produces monsters, and breaks into and drives humans too. Well beyond the Middle Ages, tragic cosmic experience is expressed in the paintings of Goya and the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, and Artaud. “Artaud never ceased to claim that Western culture lost its tragic focus the moment it finally forgot what he termed the great solar madness of the world, the violent ceremonies which enacted the life and death of ‘Great Fire Satan.’”38 If madness is the absence of a work, there is no madness in the works of Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Artaud, Roussel, and van Gogh; madness put a stop to their work. But there are deranged writers who did not stop writing; Henry Darger wrote three novels of over 15,000, 10,000, and 5,000 pages. The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, contains hundreds of works made by people confined in institutions for the criminally insane. In declaring the works of Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Roussel to be literature and declaring the discourse and writings recorded by psychoanalysis to be in the field of literature, literature manquée, Foucault makes the content of this discourse independent of the organic illness these people have suffered and the violence that erupts in their behavior— neither compensation for or symbolic expression of them.39 The Marquis de Sade indulged in little of what we have come to call sadism. Salvador Dali said,

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”40 Certainly people of sound health and impeccable behavior write the most transgressive discourse. But there are countless texts drenched with the paranoia, depression, and rage of the authors. Pierre Klossowski argued that Nietzsche’s final collapse was what he risked from the beginning in the structure of his thought and life.41 We have “accepted the words of Nerval and Artaud, and recognized [ourselves] in their words but not in them,” Foucault observes.42 Do we not have to recognize that Nerval and Artaud put themselves in their discourse, put their corrosive and malignant compulsions in it? Do not the words we read to some measure awaken in us the experience that drove them? Will we be able to one day recognize ourselves in those dark compulsions?

3. Mystic, Mad, Enemy Discourse Michel de Certeau studied the Western Christian mystics, or more exactly, mystic discourse.43 This discourse began in the thirteenth century with Hadewijch of Antwerp and Meister Eckhart; what was constituted and identified as “the science of the saints,” “mystical science” was written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was elaborated into mystical theology alongside positive theology, which developed the ideas of scripture, the councils, and the church fathers, and scholastic theology, elaborated in Aristotelian and nominalist language. The language of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite supplied much of the vocabulary of mystical theology.44 Certeau studied the writers from Teresa of Avila to Angelus Silesius, especially Nicholas of Cusa, John of the Cross, Jean-Joseph Surin, and Blaise Pascal. Certeau’s texts are not mystical; he is not writing from within mystical experience. His is the work of a historian; he examines the archives and analyzes what is linguistically and rhetorically distinctive of mystic discourse. Yet this will not be to envision it simply as an object of knowledge; “Such an approach involves an attempt to repeat its movements ourselves.”45 The mystics wrote autobiographical accounts of their experience, but mysticism is not an individual or private practice. It establishes relations between spiritual masters and disciples and networks of communication and transmission. It is harbored in monasteries, convents, and hermitages, which require transactions with economic and craft organizations. It is recognized through practices of asceticism, healings, miracles, and pilgrimages. “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as individual experience,” Certeau says.46 The mystics arise in a period when the unity of Christendom was breaking up into a multiplicity of national political units and when the authority

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of the theologians and philosophers who formulated the Christian doctrine was receding. In France the mystics typically came from the middle aristocracy, which was undergoing socioeconomic decline, in Germany from the impoverished rural nobility or urban lower craftsmen. In Spain they disproportionately came from the nuevos cristianos, the converted Jews. The mystics felt affinity with people at the lowest levels of society. The madman, the child, and the illiterate came to represent for the mystics the truth arrived at outside of the corrupt church. They told of the peasant girl from Diois whom Louis de la Rivière met, the poor cowherd of Ponçonas, the shepherd girl Anne Le Barbier, Barre the maidservant of Compiègne, Jean Aumont, a wine grower of Montmorency.47 Jean-Joseph Surin wrote of encountering an illiterate youth of nineteen or twenty, son of a baker, who astonished him with his spiritual wisdom and insight into Surin’s troubled state. This youth, he wrote, had not been taught by learned priests or by the scriptures but received everything directly from God. At the close of the nineteenth century leading figures of psychiatry assimilate mystical experience with pathology and mystic discourse with delirium. Certeau finds an indistinction of madness and sanctity at the remote origins of the mystic discourse. A figure of “madness for Christ” is told in the fourthcentury text Lausiac History by Palladius. An anchoret named Piteroum is visited by an angel who tells him to go to see a nun who simulates madness. He falls to her feet and asks her to bless him. The sixth-century Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius tells of the monk Simeon of Emesa, who strips naked in public and dances with prostitutes in bordellos free of lust because with his retreat to the desert he had attained apatheia— impassivity. Pathological states were relatively frequent in the mystics. Jean-Jacques Olier suffered long aphasic depression; Vincent de Paul suffered four years of neurasthenia. Jean-Joseph Surin at the end of his life declared in La science expérimentale des choses de au-delà that he had long been mad. He long believed that he was rejected by God, but this he vehemently affirmed, was not madness but a trial of the spirit. Breakdown and Decomposition A discourse is elaborated in relations with those who hear it and distribute it, and with resources and in places that are organized by institutions. But on the other hand, institutions produce and manifest a sublime discourse, and their practices produce individuals incapable of truth.48 An institution is an organization of power and also the establishment and a manifestation of a policy. The policy is a discourse that transcends the

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discourses of individuals, is sublime. The state allows views that contest or contradict its policies as long as those who advocate contrary policies do so along established procedures and, until they prevail, conform to the established policies of the state. It denies legitimacy to those who do not consent to its policies and refuse to obey them.49 They are identified as enemies of the state who are to be neutralized. Certeau observes that “an extreme procedure has always proliferated along the borders of institutions of truth and . . . far from diminishing . . . constantly develops, becoming more and more of a ‘regular administrative practice,’ or a political ‘routine’: torture.”50 The goal of torture is not simply to extract truth from the captive, to force him or her to reveal information about a subversive plot or collaborators. The torturer works to induce the captive to confess that the subversion is founded on dupery, that what he or she took to be a veridical picture of the state is lies. The torturer produces this avowal by isolating the captive from solidarity with his comrades, by sleep deprivation and noise bombardment disordering his sensibility, by electric shocks and beatings reducing his body to carrion. The goal is to make the enemy in his own eyes, and in those of anyone, incapable of truth. This goal is not declared; the institution instead alleges that its adherents acknowledge its truth because the evidence of that truth enlightens them. The torturer, to be sure, reduces him- or herself also into a brutal mass of force incapable of understanding, criticism, and truth. Daniel Paul Schreber knew this procedure of an institution intimately; he had been named president of the Dresden Appeals Court, whose function was to put this procedure into effect. After a breakdown he was confined in the Sonnenstein asylum, diagnosed with dementia praecox. One day he heard the lower god Ariman thunderously address him with the word Luder— rotten person, slut. This word impacted him, making him believe he was recognized, put in place, adopted by Ariman. He took on this name that inaugurated the experience of his body being transformed into that of a slut attractive to god. He elaborated an unending discourse on the basis of this inaugural identification, articulating a world that he inhabited where God “deals only with corpses.” The mystics appeared in Catholic monarchies like Spain and France, and they saw the church and the state joined in an institution that one should not, or can no longer, change.51 Mystical experience often began with an auditory hallucination: a voice that identified one as worthless, a mind in decomposition incapable of truth in a corrupt body. Surin repeatedly saw Jesus Christ in the Eucharist in the form of an armed man hurling thunderbolts at him; he heard himself being identified as damned. The mystics

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inflicted upon themselves practices of sleep deprivation, deprival of food, and flagellations that institutions of the state inflict upon its enemies. “The destruction of human dignity is also the beginning for the mystics . . . accompanied by the theatricalization of his body (wounds, infections, purulence, etc.). . . . In the words of Gottfried Benn, the ‘stigmatized self’ is the locus of breakdown and decomposition where ‘faith’ arises.”52 The captive of the state may utter the avowal the torturer demands and then let himself be put to whatever uses the state contrives. Or he may now identify himself as an agent at the service of the institution and use his acknowledgment of inner decomposition to “allow himself any liberty.” The extreme contempt for oneself and the conviction that the Spirit is there and speaks engender what the mystics called “pure love”: I love you no less for being damned. Grigori Rasputin and the Russian mystic sect Khlysty claimed that repentance was necessary for salvation, and thus to have sinned mightily was required for total repentance. Mystic Discourse The mystics experienced the loss of a voice, a saying, in the said, in the biblical and theological texts. They no longer share the medieval persuasion that God speaks in the cosmos or in the books that speak of God. Mysticism is a theory and pragmatics of communication with God and with others in spiritual intercourse. Mystical experience is the ecstatic experience of being addressed by the Spirit.53 The experience is prepared by a break with everyday practices and discourse made by an act of will: “I want nothing” and “I want God to want in place of my will wanting.”54 This act of will is independent of knowledge or belief, for example, that God exists or that the Gospel is true. The “I will” creates in the mind and in language a void, without determinate contents. The “I” of this “I will” is without identity; it is a yes without objects, without goals, an indeterminate or limitless yes. The “I” that is empty hears a voice that speaks in and speaks to him or her. The Spirit is a voice, el que habla, says John of the Cross; it is made up of voice.55 The arrival of the voice is experienced in suffering; it is known as a blow struck. Suffering is veridical, testifying to the reality of the voice.56 Certeau analyzes specific linguistic operations that characterize mystic discourse. It introduces words outside of scholastic or positive theology, outside of Latin. It abounds in metaphors, catachresis, anamorphosis, and oxymorons. Expressions such as “cruel repose,” “dark light,” “sweet burning,”

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“glorious nonsense,” “heavenly madness,” “silent music” do not refer to two traits of a referent but instead point to what is unsaid and unsayable. Mystic expressions draw attention to themselves in their opacity and obscure the things designated. “Mysticism operates as a process whereby the objects of meaning vanish, beginning with God himself; it is as though the function of mysticism were to bring a religious episteme to a close and erase itself at the same time, to produce the night of the subject while marking the twilight of culture.”57 The alliterations, rhymes, assonances, rhythms, and the homophonies, internal rhymes, and glossolalic repetitions of vowels and of words maintain a saying where there is not something said. Recovering the Mystic Discourse Mystic discourse came to an end at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which was to be dominated by the Enlightenment. Without the belief in God the form of mystic discourse subsists, Certeau says, in a certain tradition of poetry that invokes an unknown beyond, in words that undermine determination. He names Nelly Sachs and René Char. The self-surpassing desire of the mystics “can no longer speak to someone. It seems to have become infans, voiceless, more solitary and lost than before, or less protected and more radical, ever seeking a body or poetic locus.”58 Certeau argued that mystical experience is not “something we can apprehend behind the texts.”59 “Experience . . . does not exist anywhere else than where it is said.”60 But “all spiritual experience that expresses itself, the moment it is expressed, is ‘alienated,’ so to speak, in language. First, it uses the words of others; it therefore is subject to the concomitant constraints. John of the Cross, Surin, or the man of today speaks only a language received from others.”61 And the texts exist inasmuch as they are accepted— ordered and selected— by a community. From the first, the mystic discourse was received as something suspect. The historian finds it in the midst of objections, accusations, condemnations. Documents recount in minute detail— a sadistic obsession, Certeau says— the strange psychic and physical states of these people, convulsing organs, wounds and bleeding, distorted limbs, levitations. Most of the mystic texts were written under requests or orders of authorities, spiritual families, or politico- religious networks. The texts that survive— those of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Marie of the Incarnation, Angelus Silesius— have been legitimated by institutions: a church, a sect, a publisher. “The ‘primi-

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tive’ experience is today, in our historiography, what we, for our part, ‘receive’ and what we contrast with what others in the past have ‘received.’”62 But the way of reading texts by historians is different from that of the mystics; they practice “spiritual reading.” For them the materiality of a book first marks an anchor in a zone emptied of the practical and familiar environment. The reading awakens fervors and passions; it originates, legitimizes, and nourishes dreams. Spiritual reading, the mystics say, requires “swallowing,” “ruminating,” “chewing over,” and “digesting” the text; Certeau understands that spiritual reading is done by the body and marks the body, it produces intestinal pains or distension, sudden warmth in the head, heart palpations, the outpouring of tears. Spiritual reading is readily interrupted by invocation and dialogue. The mystic harkens, in the words of the book, to the voice— not of the author but of the Spirit— addressing, summoning and judging him or her.63 If we no longer read texts with this spiritual and mystical reading, it is because mysticism is a social act. We do not live in the midst of communities in whom mystic discourse is received. We only receive the texts that those communities received— selected and ordered. We receive them in our communities in which medical and psychiatric discourse and also literary criticism and political and economic history structure the way we receive texts. Certeau reads them especially within the fields of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and politico-economic history. Yet this will not be to envision it simply as an object of knowledge; “Such an approach involves an attempt to repeat its movements ourselves.”64 This suggests that to some degree Certeau also reads them with a “spiritual reading.” Indeed, could one understand them at all without to some measure understanding them as the mystics understood them?

4. The Waste Products of Thought For Georges Bataille the tragic, the Orient, the oneiric, the erotic, the violent, the mad, the mystic are not so many excluded discourses that are now to be appropriated. Appropriation, Bataille writes, is communion— participation, identification, incorporation, assimilation.65 Oral consumption is the elementary form. Humans appropriate clothing, shelters, tools, land; their forces shape and activate them. Appropriation is also worked by thought that looks forward to a day when all empirical events will be deducible from concepts, laws, and formulas possessed by the mind. Appropriation constitutes the world of work and reason.

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Our bodies expel urine and excrement, menstrual blood and semen. They discharge cries, screams, laughter in orgasm. We release sobs and tears before corpses and before the premonition of death. Our bodies expel themselves in death. The outer zone comprises zones in nature where uncontrollable forces erupt and zones in outer space where terrifying forces have sway over us. It comprises also what we expel and that repels us— excrement, menstrual excretions, shed blood. The outer zone strikes those who approach it with fear, is marked out with prohibitions and taboos, constituted as sacred. Bataille separates the sacred from religious conceptions of the divine. With the enterprise of appropriating outside nature that began with the first sedentary civilizations, the domestication of plants and animals, and the appropriation of land divided into parcels began a work of dividing the sacred into two separate realms. One part was held to be beneficent and constituted a celestial and divine realm. All that provokes horror and fear was taken to be inferior and demoniacal. The celestial realm is conceived as holy, wholesome, and healing. The multiplicity of cosmic forces and apparitions are eventually reduced to one God, complete, perfect, and enduring changelessly. “God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stage of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity,”66 whose activity consists in looking after the welfare of humans in the world of work and reason. In the profane sphere we compartmentalize our energies and gear our bodies into tools and machines and find ourselves welded into an identity. Then there arises the compulsion to transgress the precautions and prohibitions, to plunge into the outer zone, the alien and inassimilable. To make contact with the sacred powers is to break into them, to violate the sanctuary, to transgress the taboos. The sense of risk, of not knowing what we risk, strikes us with anxiety. To make contact with the sacred is not to absorb its powers in oneself; it is to be lacerated and flayed, to be disconnected from one’s identity, depersonalized. At the same time the energies plunging ahead into the unknown are lived in exaltation. The prohibitions motivate the transgressions; exhilaration is intensified in the anxiety. Bataille envisions a discourse about what we expel and what repels us, the alien and the inassimilable, which he names heterology. “But it is above all the term scatology (the science of excrement) that retains in the present circumstances (the specialization of the sacred) an incontestable expressive

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value as the doublet of an abstract term such as heterology.”67 Heterology will perceive excrement, menstrual blood, semen, and shed blood as substances that excite both horror and fascination. It will observe individual and collective activities that release excess energies without return. Our organisms release energies in play, dance, and song, feasting and orgy. They discharge energies in the fabrication of jewels and luxury goods, in gambling, games and extreme sports, monumental art, combat and war. Our minds discharge excess mental activities in idle fantasies and in outbursts of laughter before the unworkable and the absurd. By night thought gives way to dreams, which are waste products of the brain. In his Erotism: Death and Sensuality and The Tears of Eros68 Bataille explored the compulsion to leave the profane sphere, to plunge toward the outer zone, this sacrificial compulsion, in the inner experience of erotic compulsions and in festive drives. In The Accursed Share,69 he argued that from the beginning economy involves gift and potlatch and production of luxury goods. He studied the unproductive expenditure of resources in sumptuous display, festivity, and monuments. Today a portion of production has to be destroyed in war or given without repayment. The heterological discourse will not show how what is discharged serves as a product or a resource for objectives, will not appropriate the outer zone into the world of work and reason. In poetry common words designate in visible things something invisible and uncanny. There are moments in everyday life when a train of thought stumbles, producing nonsense that breaks into laughter, when absurdity and speechlessness break into sobs and tears. They also occur in eroticism, where the seriousness of action is parodied in teasing and seductive games and where speech disintegrates into nonsense, murmurs, moans, sighs, and laughter. Language can lead us to the frontiers where our mind finds itself open upon nothing that words can grasp.70 In moments of austere lucidity thought assents to this ignorance, sacrifices itself. The mind that plunges into the darkness of the impossible, the inapprehensible, the incomprehensible finds itself without support, pulsating with its own energies and has the sovereignty of a subject that exists in the apex of intensity without objects. No longer subordinated to some anticipated result, its ecstasy is the ecstasy of a self-propelled and sovereign movement.71 Bataille practices a “spiritual reading” of a poem of his own composition. I imagine the earth projected in space, like a woman screaming, her head in flames.

Philosophy’s Tasks / 213 Before the terrestrial world whose summer and winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed of innumerable turning stars, limitlessly losing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendors whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be annihilated. I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of time, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed. There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them.72

Every exhilaration, every extreme joy, is a practice for leaping forth into the region of death. In every joy we sense that it would be possible to experience the leap into death as joy. Conversely, if one could attain the extreme experience of joy before death itself, one would be delivered to all the joys that come in every adventure risked, every love risked.

NOTES

PA R T I . O U T S I D E

Outside

1. 2. 3.

As of April 2014. Adolf Portman, Animal Forms and Appearance: A Study of the Appearance of Animals (New York: Schocken, 1967). “For despite the ink spilled by the Judeo-Christian tradition to conceal it, no situation seems more tragic, more offensive to heart and mind, than that of a humanity coexisting and sharing the joys of a planet with other living species yet being unable to communicate with them. One understands why myths refuse to consider this an original flaw in the creation and see in its appearance the event that inaugurated the human condition and its weakness.” Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 139. The Weight of Reality

1. 2. 3.

Henri Wallon, Les origins de la pensée chez l’enfant, vol. 2, Les tâches intellectuelles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945), 382–402. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 143–82. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 130–34. Doubles

1.

2. 3. 4.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1969), 127–131; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 293. Yasunari Kawabata, The Lake, trans. Reiko Tsukimura (Tokyo: Kondasha, 1974), 141–43. . Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Mcquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 98–99. Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Vintage, 1996), 8, 10, 20. .

216 / Notes Shadows

1.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, chapter 14, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali” (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 360–411. PA R T I I . C H A N C E

Cause, Choice, Chance

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Emily Underwood-Lee, “Titillation,” in Dangerous Currents: Risk and Regulation at the Interface of Medicine and the Arts (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 93–97. Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=happy. Sam Bleakley, Surfing Brilliant Corners (Cornwall: Alison Hodge, 2010), 33. Ibid., 6. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1:12. Bleakley, Surfing Brilliant Corners, 21. Cf. Kevin Krein, “Nature and Risk in Adventure Sports,” in Mike McNamee, ed., Philosophy, Risk, and Adventure Sports (New York: Routledge, 2007), 84–86. There is a perverse delight in putting oneself in a potentially dangerous situation, knowing that your experience and skill makes you quite safe. To stand with a friend in eerie moonlight at the foot of a vast mountain wall and be certain that you can safely reach the top— that is a wonderful feeling of self- confidence. It might seem an absurdly pointless thing to do, but to have the nerve to go and try it, just to see if you can, is an affirmation of everything noble in humanity. The task has been rationalised, and carefully weighed, and now you must act and do it right; it is a suspended moment. As you step up on to the first hold or drive the first axe blow you step into a new perspective, a world that is absolutely and cruelly real. The power of it is indescribable, as vital on the first step as it is on the last, at the base or on the summit, and the intensity only gradually fades on your return to the valley. (Joe Simpson, This Game of Ghosts [London: Viking, 1994], 118–19)

9. Bleakley, Surfing Brilliant Corners, 138. 10. Ibid., 10. 11. Ibid., 140. PA R T I I I . PA S S I O N S

The Altiplano

1.

2. 3.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 91. Yet ethologists have amassed a great deal of evidence that pigeons form general concepts (Alphonso Lingis, Pigeons [Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 2010]), that seagulls who drop shells in front of oncoming cars to break them grasp causal and instrumental relations, that chimpanzees teach their offspring what they have grasped about the artificial environment in which they may find themselves. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “‘Born with a Silver Spoon’; The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6:2 (Fall 1995): 201–21. J. M. G. Le Clézio, L’extase matérielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 229.

Notes / 217 Return of the First Person Singular

1.

“The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.” Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New-York: Basic Books, 1983), 59. 2. Ibid., 362. 3. Ibid., 362–63. 4. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 362. 5. Ibid., 81. 6. Ellen Fox Keller, “Whole Bodies, Whole Persons?,” in Joâo Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 353. 7. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 2–5. 8. Kenneth E. Read, The High Valley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); J. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (1983): 118– 43; James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Geertz, Works and Lives; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 9. João Bierhl, “Other Life: AIDS, Biopolitics and Subjectivity in Brazil’s Zones of Social Abandonment” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999); Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margins: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Paul Komesaroff, Experiments in Love and Death: Postmodernism, Microethics and the Body (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1:11 (March 1987): 6–41; Howard Spiro, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Mary G. McCrea Curnen, eds., Facing Death: Where Culture, Religion, and Medicine Meet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 10. Robert J. Barrett, “The Schizophrenic and the Liminal Persona in Modern Society,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 22 (1998): 465–94; Ellen Corin, “Facts and Meaning in Psychiatry: An Anthropological Approach to the Lived Worlds of Schizophrenics,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 14 (1990): 153–88; Ellen Corin, “The Thickness of Being: Intentional Worlds, Strategies of Identity, and Experience among Schizophrenics,” Psychiatry 55:3 (1998): 266–78; Ellen Corin, “The ‘Other’ of Culture in Psychosis: The Ex- Centricity of the Subject,” in Joâo Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 273– 314; Michael Goddard, “What Makes Hari Run? The Social Construction of Madness in a Highland Papua New Guinea Society,” Critique of Anthropology 18 (1998): 61–82; T. Schwartz, G. M. White, and C. A. Lutz, eds., New Directions in Psychological Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 181–205; J. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds., Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 110–45; Muriel Hammer, Kurt Salzinger, and Samuel Sutton, eds., Psychopathology: Contributions from

218 / Notes the Social, Behavioral and Biological Sciences (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973); Ronald C. Simons and Charles C. Hughes, eds., Culture-Bound Syndromes: Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985). Aconcagua

1.

Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 74–78. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 129. 3. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 34–36. 4. Ibid., 36. 5. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 31–42. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), I §3. 7. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 10–14, 39, 40. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 129. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), III §12; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV §333. 10. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 3:230–31. P A R T I V. B E L I E F

Angels with Guns

1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

“Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down— that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Revelation 12:7–9, New International Version. The harquebus, a matchlock fired gun, was invented in Spain in the fifteenth century; it was positioned on the shoulder to be fired. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI “by the authority of the Almighty God” had divided the lands outside of Europe and declared them to belong Spain and Portugal, investing them with the mission to evangelize the heathen of those lands. They prohibited the cultivation of quinoa, the protein- rich gluten- free seed food of the Andes that had been cultivated for four thousand years, because of religious rituals performed for its cultivation. Amaranth was likewise prohibited, and crops were burned. Karen Spalding, “Social Climbers: Changing Patterns of Mobility among the Indians of Colonial Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 1:4 (1970): 645–64. The original Quechua name of the city was Qusqu. The Spanish transliterated it as Cuzco. In 1990 the city formalized the spelling Qosqo, as the Quechua name is now pronounced. Art historians continue to use the spelling “Cuzco school.” Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 31–38. “The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.” Genesis 18:1–2, New International Version.

Notes / 219 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

In battle European warriors wore their own rough clothing and armor, determined by their utilitarian function, with colors or patterns painted on their shields or embroidered on their surcoats to identify their allegiance to one lord or another. Charlemagne awarded his mounted warriors with land, and Charles the Bald made these land grants hereditary. The knights in peacetime began to clothe themselves with impractical glamorous clothing, displayed in parades, jousts, and tournaments. The transition from utilitarian to sumptuous garb marks the transition to gratuitous splendor, which philosopher Georges Bataille sees as distinctive of the realm of the sacred. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura (1649; repr. Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2011). Carolyn Dean, “Andean Androgeny and the Making of Men,” in Cecilia F. Klein, ed., Gender in Pre-Hispanic America (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), 164. “A Quechua text accompanying the creator underscores its ambivalence; it can be translated as ‘whether it be male, whether it be female.’” Dean, “Andean Androgeny,” 149. Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 95–105, 108, 110. For example, the Ajanta Caves in India, the Longmen Grottos in China, the Sanju¯sangen-do¯ in Japan, Wat Po in Thailand. “Communication . . . with our beyond (essentially in sacrifice)— not with nothingness, still less with a supernatural being, but with an indefinite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is, what cannot be grasped [begreift] in any way, what we can’t reach without dissolving ourselves . . .). . . . It can remain in an undefined state (in ordinary laughter, infinite laughter, or ecstasy).” Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: Lapis, 1988), 139. “The subject tries at first to move toward its fellow being. But once it has entered into inner experience, it is in search of an object like itself— reduced to interiority. In addition, the subject, the experience of which is in itself and from the beginning dramatic (is the loss of self), needs to objectify this dramatic character. . . . At each instant of experience, this point can radiate arms, cry out, set itself ablaze.” Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 117–18. Belief

1.

The everyday world of common sense is, phenomenologist Alfred Schutz says, the world in which we are solidly rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question, and from whose pressures and requirements we can least escape. Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 226–30. 2. Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 192–202. 3. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 112. 4. Ibid., 100–108. 5. Ibid., 103. 6. Ibid., 105. 7. Ibid., 110. 8. Ibid., 112. 9. Ibid., 118. 10. Ibid., 117.

220 / Notes 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ibid., 181. Ibid., 94–95. Ibid., 172. Claude Lévi- Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 198–204. 15. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 115. 16. Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” 196–97. Performance

1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

In 2005, the Fourth Plinth Commission was set up to select artworks to be temporarily set up on the plinth. In 2009 Antony Gormley was selected. He entitled his project “One & Other.” It extended over one hundred days, from July 6 to October 14. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993). Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Researchers have found more and more “lek” species in which the males gather to compete in ritual display and dance. They include waterbucks, topi antelopes, pinnipeds, fruit bats, moor frogs and bullfrogs, marine iguanas, species of fish, paper wasps, midges, ghost moths, and some butterfly species. Jane Belo, Trance in Bali (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV §299. P A R T V. J U S T I C E

The Future of Torture

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Rona M. Fields, “The Neurobiological Consequences of Psychological Torture,” in Almerindo E. Ojeda, ed., The Trauma of Psychological Torture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 155. Claudia Catani, Frank Neuner, Christian Wienbruch, and Thomas Elbert, “The Tortured Brain,” in Ojeda, ed., The Trauma of Psychological Torture, 173–88. Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual— 1985, Central Intelligence Agency, http:// documents.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/HumanResourceExploitationManual -CIA.pdf, L-5. Ibid., K-1. Quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, “Legacy of a Dark Decade: CIA Mind Control, Classified Behavioral Research, and the Origins of Modern Medical Ethics,” in Ojeda, ed., The Trauma of Psychological Torture, 46. “POW Study Finds 70% Helped Reds,” New York Times, August 20, 1955. Tara McKelvey, Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (New York: Carrol and Graf, 2007), 84. Truth in Reconciliation

1.

2.

Francois Bizot, The Gate, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Vintage, 2007); Bizot, Facing the Torturer, trans. Charlotte Mandell and Antoine Audouard (New York : Knopf, 2012). “Last February, Duch was led, with his consent, to the scenes of his crimes. The visit was a shock for all who witnessed it. This major judicial step took place in an atmosphere of intense, palpable emotion. ‘I ask for your forgiveness— I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might,’ he said before

Notes / 221

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

collapsing in tears on the shoulder of one of his guards.” Francois Bizot, “My Savoir, Their Killer,” New York Times, February 16, 2009. Francis Deron, Le Procès des Khmers rouges: Trente ans d’enquête sur le génocide cambodgien (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). In September 2012 the woman was declared unfit for trail, suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease; one of the men accused died in March 2013. In August 2014, the two survivors were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Leigh A. Payne, Unsettling Accounts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). In South Africa, three years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had completed its work, victims of apartheid who had testified before the commission, those who had instead given written statements, and those who had done neither were interviewed. The study found that there was no significant difference in rates of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, or other anxiety disorders among the three groups. Debra Kaminer, Dan J. Stein, Irene Mbanga, and Nompumelolo ZunguDirwayi, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: Relation to Psychiatric Status and Forgiveness among Survivors of Human Rights Abuses,” British Journal of Psychiatry 178:4 (2001): 373–77. Trudy de Ridder observed, “The psychological responses of individuals who testify or give statements are mixed. Many report an initial sense of relief at having unburdened themselves. However, a worrying number of these individuals find that in the weeks following their deposition, there is a return and intensification of symptoms associated with the original violations as well as the onset of new symptoms that may be related to an actual retraumatisation caused by retelling the story.” Trudy de Ridder, “The Trauma of Testifying: Deponent’s Difficult Healing Process,” Centre for Conflict Resolution, http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za /two/6_34/p30 _deridder.html, 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 186–205. Update: the proceedings lasted eight years. P. Pigou, N. Valji, and R. Greenstein, Assessing Levels of Human Rights Knowledge amongst the General Population and Selected Target Groups (Johannesburg: Community Agency for Social Enquiry, 1998). Suzannah Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2004), 148. When I heard that, I reflected that people in my culture sometimes respond in the same way. We do hear of victims of violence declining to testify against their aggressors or asking the court to not impose the death penalty. Sometimes they invoke religious teachings; sometimes they refuse to want the violence that they suffered inflicted on their aggressor. Certainly in the small affairs of everyday life, when we find ourselves offended or harmed, this does arouse impulses to strike back, to harm the offender. But we also find these very impulses a misery; they occupy our minds obsessively, and at some level we feel we are being invaded and obsessed by the base behavior of the one who offended us. We struggle to free ourselves of this misery, to turn to and absorb ourselves in positive undertakings and innocent friends. Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia, 207. Laura McGrew, “Truth, Justice, Reconciliation and Peace in Cambodia: 20 Years after the Khmer Rouge,” unpublished paper reporting research from December 1999 to February 2000, funded by the Canadian Embassy, Phnom Penh, March 2000, 30. Cited in Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia, 207. Linton, Reconciliation in Cambodia, 206. I reflected that in our culture remorse is demanded in the courts, and religions maintain the concept of remorse in everyday

222 / Notes discourse. Yet our thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud have long regarded remorse as a sickness in the soul that has to be healed. In the small matters of everyday wrongs and offenses, we may well want some sign from the offender that he or she will not do that again, but we do not want to deal with remorse. We do not know how to deal with someone who in all his dealings with us expresses remorse, acts out of remorse. PA R T V I . I R R E VO C A B L E

Mortality

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The god of healing medicine. Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 102–3; Heidegger, Being and Time, 227–35. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?, 103–6; Heidegger, Being and Time, 231–34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 372–79. Ibid., 289–90. Ibid., 281–85. Ibid., 299–304. Ibid., 254nxii. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1956), 6. Irrevocable Loss

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Bataille, The Accursed Share, 3:316. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 672. See also Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), 601. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ, 1982), 32. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1991). A last authorized search was in 1965, and illegal scuba divers have since continued to search. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 250. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 279. Ibid. APPENDIX

Philosophy’s Tasks

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), V §468. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV §289. Nietzsche, Daybreak, IV §356. Ibid., I §11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), II §221. Cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I §7. Next to the cult of the genius and his force there must always be placed, as its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one- sided, incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper degree

Notes / 223 of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot be melody? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All- Too- Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], II §186) 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

The aesthetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself— all this means— let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III §28) Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, I §115; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), III §61; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II §18. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, V §354, IV §335. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, . II §11. The conviction that violence is intrinsic to our animal nature has acquired new arguments from evolutionary psychology and ethnobiology. Richard W. Bloom and Nancy Dess, eds., Evolutionary Psychology and Violence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen, eds., The Evolution of Violence (New York: Springer, 2014); Aaron T. Goetz, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Violence,” Psicothema 22:1 (2010): 15–21. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, I §120. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I §103. James Gilligan, a medical doctor who has worked extensively in prisons, claims that the pleasure in wanton destruction and cruelty is embedded in an insistent self-affirmation and valuing of self. There would be a fundamental level where the violent put positive value on their way of living and thinking. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1997), 11–12, 112. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), 2. Early in the afternoon the Doctor bustled up from Battalion Head-quarters to tell me that my M. C. had come through. This gratifying little event increased my blindness to the blood-stained future. . . . For the rest of the day and, indeed, for the remainder of my military career, the left side of my chest was more often in my mind than the right— a habit which was common to a multitude of wearers of Military Cross ribbons. Books about war psychology ought to contain a chapter on ‘medal reflexes’ and ‘decoration complexes’. Much might be written, even here, about medals and their stimulating effect on those who really risked their lives for them. (Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [New York: Penguin 2013], 52) The overall justification of their way of thinking and living put on police and soldiers has incontestably the effect of making them exempt from contestation of their violence formulated by anyone. With such a justification they may pursue violence to the limit of self-destruction. Likewise, the justification put on competitive athletes in contact sports. Ann C. McKee et al., “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Athletes: Progressive Tauopathy After Repetitive Head Injury,” Journal of Neuropathology

224 / Notes

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

& Experimental Neurology 68:7 (July 1, 2009): 709–735; CBS News / AP, “Major Study of Athletes’ Brains Links Head Injuries to Brain Damage,” https://www.cbsnews.com /news/major-study-of-athletes-brains-links-head-injuries-to-brain-damage. Nietzsche, of Morals,. II §14. Benedict finds the place and significance is marked in a culture not only with value terms but also established rituals and ceremonies. Nietzsche goes back to the acts that give rise to the value terms, the nobles who invented these terms to affirm and consecrate themselves. The victim may be a woman or child, and in order to minimize the risk to oneself, the victim is killed from an ambush set by a trail. “Ilongots . . . found it beyond their moral comprehension that army officers, as they saw in 1945, could command their troops to move into open fire.” Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 63–64, 18n. Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Ruth Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 279. Ibid., 275–76. Ibid., 283. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV §276. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, preface, §6. Nietzsche, Daybreak, IV §371. . “It is precisely the clumsy, timid natures who easily become killers: they do not understand how to defend or revenge themselves in a measure appropriate to the case; lacking intelligence and presence of mind, their hatred knows no expedient other than destruction.” Ibid., IV §410. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, I §49. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, . III §16. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Abington: Routledge, 2006). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 2010). Foucault, History of Madness, xxx. Ibid., xxxi. Ibid., 551. Ibid., 552. Ibid., 553. Ibid., 552. Ibid., 553. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 549. Salvador Dali, Lecture at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, December 18, 1934. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Foucault, History of Madness, 545. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 2 vols., trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 2015), cited hereafter as MF; Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Notes / 225

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

Press, 1986), cited hereafter as H; Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). A body of writings first cited in writings of the sixth century BCE, whose author identified himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul of Tarsus mentioned in Acts 17:34. As a work of profound philosophy from apostolic times, these writings had, beginning with Maximus the Confessor, immense influence on orthodox theology. In the ninth century CE they were translated into Latin; Thomas Aquinas cites them more than seventeen hundred times. The Florentine humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), showing how much of the writings are derived from Neo-Platonist Proclus, who died in 485, established that the author could not have been St. Paul’s convert. H, 83. MF, 2:100. MF, 1:236–37. “The institution is not only the delusional epiphany of an ideal ego which makes it possible to produce believers. It is not only a set of processes which generate credibility by withdrawing what they promise to give. It is not only a relation between something known and something kept silent, which is the mode in which Freud interprets the sacerdotal institution: that it is designed to keep a known murder silent. The institution is in addition the assignation-localization of rottenness on the inside, designates rotten people for itself, and the manifestation or ‘theory’ of the sublime.” H, 46. The outsider “assumes that a discourse— either a political discourse (a revolutionary project), a religious one (a reformist intention) or even an analytical one (‘free’ expression)— has the power to remake the institution.” H, 41. The institution identifies this outsider as an enemy. H, 40. H, 40. H, 43. “Experience is for the few.” Jean-Joseph Surin, quoted in MF, 1:180. MF, 1:166–67. MF, 2:137. H, 162. H, 37. MF, 1:299. MF, 2:100. Ibid. Ibid. MF, 2:101. MF, 2:132. H, 83. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Alan Stoekl, Carl L. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 102n. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986); Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001). Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991, 1993).

226 / Notes 70.

I reflected on unknowing, and I saw that human life was full of moments— which I assign to knowledge— when the ceaseless operation of cognition is dissolved. I referred to those moments in speaking of sobs, of laughter that makes one gasp . . . in them the train of thought was broken off. . . . The object of tears or of laughter— and of other effects such as ecstasy, eroticism or poetry— seemed to me to correspond to the very point at which the object of thought vanishes. Up to that point, that object might be an object of knowledge, but only up to that point, so that the effect of knowledge would regularly fail. (Ibid., 3:208)

71.

I resolved long ago not to seek knowledge, as others do, but to seek its contrary, which is unknowing. I no longer anticipated the moment when I would be rewarded for my effort, when I would know at last, but rather the moment when I would no longer know, when my initial anticipation would dissolve into nothing. . . . This way of going in the wrong direction on the paths of knowledge— to get off them, not to derive a result that others anticipate— leads to the principle of sovereignty of being and of thought, which from the standpoint where I am placed at the moment has this meaning: that thought, subordinated to some anticipated result, completely enslaved, ceases to be in being sovereign, that only unknowing is sovereign. (Ibid., 3:208) The thought that comes to a halt in the face of what is sovereign rightfully pursues its operation to the point where its object dissolves into NOTHING, because, ceasing to be useful, or subordinate, it becomes sovereign in ceasing to be. (Ibid., 3:204)

72. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 239.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Photographs are by the author except where noted. Frontispiece. Begging bowl of human skull, Tibet, 1996. Plume of Malay great argus pheasant. Part I. Outside Page viii. Nordkapp, Norway, 2011. Outside Page 2. Box jellyfish. Photograph courtesy David Doubilet / National Geographic Creative. The Weight of Reality Page 6. Altiplano, Bolivia, 2010. Doubles Page 16. Black coral, Pulau Seribu, Indonesia, 1981. Shadows Page 22. Sri Rama, 2015. Part II. Chance Page 26. Glass sphere and eggs of Cabot’s tragopan. Cause, Choice, Chance Page 28. Sarnath, India, 1974.

228 / About the Photographs Part III. Passions Page 42. Altiplano, Bolivia, 2010. The Altiplano Page 44. Chautani, Bolivia, 2010. Return of the First Person Singular Page 52. Huli, Papua New Guinea, 2007. Aconcagua Page 62. Cerro Aconcagua, Argentina, 2013. Seduction Page 74. La Paz, Bolivia, 2010. Truthfulness Page 80. La Paz, Bolivia, 2010. Part IV. Belief Page 82. Bottle, Byblos, Lebanon, circa fifteenth century, 2009; sand rose, Argentina, 2013. The Stone Axe Page 84. Stone axe, Prabanan, Java, Indonesia, 1988. Angels with Guns Page 88. Qosqo, Peru, 1996. Belief Page 96. Ubud, Bali, 2012. Photograph courtesy Katherine Picard. Performance Page 108. Trafalgar Square, London, 2000. Photograph courtesy Chris Beckett. Voyage Page 116. Batik, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1980. Part V. Justice Page 120. Quito, Ecuador, 2014.

About the Photographs / 229 The Future of Torture Page 122. Banaue, Philippines, 1979. Justice Page 130. Cajamarca, Peru, 2012. The System Page 136. Tallinn, Estonia, 2009. Truth in Reconciliation Page 138. Kaing Guek Eav. Photograph courtesy Mak Remissa / POOL / EPA / Shutterstock. Part VI. Irrevocable Page 152. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013. The Babies in Trees Pages 154 and 158. Tora Toraja, Indonesia, 2012. Mortality Page 160. Photograph of the sculpture Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte, by Rebeca Matte Bello, Santiago, Chile, 2012. Dignity Page 170. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph courtesy Roberto Garcia. Irrevocable Loss Page 174. Altiplano, Bolivia, 2010. Part VII. Gratitude Gratitude Page 188. Lalibela, Ethiopia, 2009. Appendix Philosophy’s Tasks Page 194. La Paz, Bolivia, 2010.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following: “Aconcagua” was originally published in Passion and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis, ed. Randolph Wheeler (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 3–16. “Angels with Guns” was originally published in Rendezvous with the Sensuous: Readings on Aesthetics, ed. Linda Ardito and John Murungi (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 2–18. “The Babies in Trees” was originally published in Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 235–45. “Dignity” was originally published in The Humanistic Psychologist 38 (2010): 267–68. “Doubles” was originally published in Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis, ed. Bobby George and Tom Sparrow (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2014), 61–68. “Irrevocable Loss” originally appeared in Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations, ed. Anna Street, Julian Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 279–99. “Outside” was originally published in Social Text 29, no. 1 (106 [Spring 2011]): 37–42. “Performance” was originally published as “Our Performing Bodies” in Antony Gormley, One and Other (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), 158–63. Permission granted by The Random House Group Ltd. “Return of the First Person Singular” was originally published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 163–74. “Seduction” was originally published in The Humanistic Psychologist 40 (2012): 109–14. A version of “Truth in Reconciliation” was originally published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 8, no. 3 (2011): 239–43. “The Weight of Reality” was originally published in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 45, no. 4 (2012): 37–49.