cincinnatus_c (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cincinnatus_c) wrote2018-01-23 10:17 pm
cincinnatus_c) wrote2018-01-23 10:17 pm
I'm telling you stories. Trust me.
Trying to keep up a running summary and commentary has become overwhelming. (I've had a mild stomach ache for three days; this may be partly why. (But maybe I'm allergic to eggs. Or there's something wrong with the water. Or I caught something from the cats.)) It's time to regroup. This afternoon I've been looking back at some Torah commentary posts of Howard's--actually I started looking for his recent post about the "rape" of Dinah, and one thing led to a whole lot of others, and I ended up looking at posts of Howard's about Jacob and his children from each of the last three years. This is instructive. Howard's Torah commentaries were the inspiration for my abortive lectionary project last Lent, because they follow the lectionary in use at his synagogue. It appears that the lectionary they use generally goes through the Torah in order, as opposed to the Christian Revised Common Lectionary (and its predecessors), which generally selects readings thematically, and so contributes to the decontextualized understanding, or lack thereof, of the bible common to so many Christian church-goers, such as my erstwhile self, which my current Bible Gateway program is designed to overcome. What this means is, Howard's commentaries come back to the same texts again and again, and each time the emphasis and interpretation is at least a little different.
This is a way in which Howard's example is useful again and again--if there is something that should be done, you don't just do it or fail to do it; you find a way for it to be done, and you revise the way along the way. Sometimes this means only playing the part that you can play and not taking the whole task on yourself. In the second of the courses I took with him Howard told us that when he arrived at the University of Toronto as an undergrad, he saw the library in his college--the main, downtown campus of U. of Toronto comprises a number of affiliated "colleges", each with their own particular history and character--and thought it was the library, and so he thought he could read all the books in the library, and learn virtually everything there was to know. Then he discovered the central library for the whole university. And, he told us, he was depressed for a week. What was the point of reading anything if he couldn't even scratch the surface of everything? But then, he told us, he realized he didn't have to do it all himself. Different people can read different books and learn from each other--they can all delegate the work to each other. Howard told this story in a mixed graduate/honours-undergraduate class, as he was assigning a group project in which we grad students would use the undergrads as research assistants. I probably don't have to tell you that I found this horrifying. But the particularities of my psychology notwithstanding, the point was well made and well taken.
That said, psychological particularities matter. That's actually something I felt Howard to be maybe insufficiently sensitive about back then. I'll always remember being in his house, in his study, for a seminar meeting that happened there for some reason, and him telling us, for some reason to do with our upcoming seminar presentations, that no one ever actually died of embarrassment. I did not accept this as a fact (although, as it happens, seminar presentations were one of the kinds of things, like karaoke singing, about which my social anxiety conspicuously and curiously didn't particularly disable me), and, anyway, whether or not anyone ever dies of embarrassment, certainly some people are more prone to dying of embarrassment than others, and sometimes it's good to devise workarounds for that. (But then again sometimes the best workaround is to deny that anyone ever dies of embarrassment.) But then in 2015 Howard posted a blog series about shame, in which he was very hard (harder than I would be, but this is one of those things I'll get around to talking about, uh, lentement[1]) on shame and humiliation ... and one of his recurring themes these last few years is the psychological particularities that are supposedly due to birth order. And another of the things I always remember of Howard: at the conference I helped organize for his retirement, Claudio Duran, whom Howard had helped secure employment at York so that he could escape from Chile after Pinochet's coup, a very gentle and generous man who was also on my dissertation committee, was to give a talk but was overcome with emotion and couldn't speak. At the end of the conference, Howard gave a talk that was a commentary on, in turn, every one of the preceding presentations over the two days of the conference.[2] He told a story about himself and Claudio, about a time not long after Claudio arrived at York, when Howard had said something critical of something Claudio had said--I feel like this may have been in a course of Claudio's that Howard sat in on, but I'm not sure. I don't remember what Howard said about Claudio's reaction, but I'll always remember the way he said what it made him realize: "I hurt him." The way he said it indicated both puzzlement and empathy, and a concession that sometimes you have to make concessions to people's psychological particularities, and that doing so maybe does not come so naturally to him.[3]
Anyway: I am not inclined to delegate to other people (and for that matter I'm not all that inclined to being delegated to, either[4]), at least not directly (because, after all, one way or another, we all do, whether together or apart), so the problem has to be dealt with in other ways. One way is to allow for the project's taking a long time. (This is one of those things that in some ways I obviously have a problem with, in the typical way of the kid for whom things came too easy too soon and so can't handle it when things get hard, and in other ways comes very easily to me, as when I grow trees from seed and plant seedlings that will fulfill their intended purpose, if they ever do at all, years and years and years from now. Which is to say, it's one of those things about me that you could easily see only one side of or the other, and so different people could form opposite impressions of what I'm like in that regard. (I don't mean to suggest that I'm all that unusual in that way, although I do suspect that I am unusually inclined not to deny one side or the other of the various tensions in my personality. I am at least resistant to the mania for self-categorization that seems so widespread (though how can I trust myself to say that about myself? (and I can quickly pile up counterexamples ... )), but maybe it's just that the self-categorizers are so noisy about it. (And of course maybe they're so noisy about it because they're so unsure of themselves. Some of them. Maybe.))) I do need to read the bible in a year, if I'm going to read it at all, but this project of, uh, re-writing it can't be done in a year, both in the sense that it is impossible for me to do it in the space of one year (and will become especially impossible once the downtimes of most of my other projects are over), and in the sense that it can't be done once and for all anyway. As I used to tell my students, you've got to carry it out with you into the world; you've got to let the text and the world work on each other.
The thing I worry about, though, about not re-writing it as I'm reading, is that, as I said, it'll slip through my fingers. But I know from experience that much of what I write will slip through my fingers, too, and some time later I will read what I've written and be surprised I'd ever thought that, or disappointed that what I thought I'd just thought up for the first time I had also thought up long ago. I think now and then of a time I happened to be sitting on a plane next to a guy I was slightly acquainted with; we were both going to the same conference. I learned then that he was a Rheostatics fan, a bigger and older Rheostatics fan than I was. It was a short flight and we talked a bit about what we do. We got talking about something to do with Rawls; he'd published a paper about something to do with Rawls, and I asked him something about what he thought about something, and he said something like, "Let me try to remember what I said about that." I felt like you shouldn't have to try to remember what you said about something in order to say what you think about it, but of course I find myself doing that, too, and it bothers me when I do it. I start saying something and then realize that, no wait, actually I thought a different thing about that. When that happens the whole "I think that" thing feels like it's shown up as artificial--like if the thoughts you think don't come to you spontaneously then they're artificial and somehow not really yours, even if you thunk em up yourself. In some way that's probably a bit of romanticism I'd be better off without, and it's certainly unfair to criticize anyone for trying to think of what the position they thought up for themselves on anything is, but there's at least something to it, and I suppose what there is to it is something along the lines of having positions being sophistry, although sophistry is all right as long as you don't get attached to it: positions are partial, and you need to have them since there's no way to the whole except by way of the parts, but you need to not mistake parts for the whole.
Anyway, what I know is that while most of it slips away in any event you have to keep coming back to it and have faith that, over time, it grows.
So now I've used up pretty much all the time I can use for today on a meta-commentary that I maybe would've better spent on the commentary, but one other meta-comment I was going to make is this: if I'm going to keep this up in some way, probably the best thing to do is pick out one thing in the day's text that seems like the thing. Everything else can wait if it has to, and chances are good that next year some one of them will have come to seem like the thing. The one thing I have been meaning to say about Isaac, which I don't have time now to elaborate on but really only needs to be set down as a marker anyway, is that with Isaac, love shows up in the Hebrew bible: the first time the Hebrew word for "love" appears is when God tells Abraham, "Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you." The next time it appears is when Rebekah comes to Isaac and he loves her. Then Isaac loves Esau, but Rebekah loves Jacob. And then, funnily enough, since "Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game," Isaac tells Esau to go out hunting and then make him the dish that he loves, and then he will give Esau his blessing. (Howard, I saw today, suggests that Isaac tells Esau to go out hunting to get him out of the house so as to facilitate the supposed subterfuge that results in Jacob getting the blessing supposedly intended for Esau.) Hebrew, apparently, doesn't have different words for the love of a man for a woman, for a son, and for a fine Cuban cigar.
And then once Jacob takes centre stage, the whole thing practically turns into a soap opera of love and hate. I keep thinking that if you ever bought into the idea that the French troubadors of the Renaissance invented romantic love, as I used to be at least open to doing, you ought to read these chapters of Genesis about Isaac and Jacob. (I also keep thinking that my girlfriend when I was an undergrad told me that an English prof of hers had said that Chaucer and his buddies invented romantic love "as a lark", but then remembering that it was actually Valentine's Day. Or something.)
One last thing, before I forget, and until I forget again: another thing I came across in Howard's blog today was him saying that he generally figures that the ages given for people around the time of Abraham and Isaac are (for whatever reason) doubled, so that Isaac was actually twenty rather than forty when Rebekah became his wife, and so on. Several hours later (while I was washing my hands; how much thinking I'd get done if I could just spend all my time washing my hands!) I realized that that would make nonsense of what Howard says about Abraham being a feeble old man of over a hundred when he binds Isaac, it being absurd that Sarah could be sexually attractive to Abimelech, and so forth. Of course, Howard's interpretations don't hang together. Why expect them to?
I just (well, you know, six hours ago now) turned on the CBC music "revival hour" stream that, last time I was listening to it, played something I said reminded me of Alkan, and now, of course, the first thing it plays is Alkan. All part of God's plan. By which I mean the Doctor's. Bloody dream crabs. ("Funeral March for the Death of a Parrot", I have finally gotten google to translate the title as. Well! I never wanted to do this in the first place. I wanted to be ... a lumberjack!)
[1] Lest anyone get the wrong idea, "Lent" is actually a Germanic word, not a Romantic one, and has to do with springtime, not slowness.
[2] Another thing I always remember of Howard is his telling me, at the end of our first meeting, not to be afraid to use him; "I'm not a Kantian," he said. I think I've noted before that learning of Howard's old friendship with Sam Ajzenstat suggested to me that Howard's non-Kantianism, or at least his inclination to frame himself as a non-Kantian, was directly related to Sam's Kantianism. Anyway, "you can't just use people", according to Kant, amounts to the same thing as saying that everything you do, if it is to be morally acceptable, must be, in essence, universalizable--that it must be just the kind of thing that anyone in a situation such as you are in ought to do. Kierkegaard's assault on that idea, in defense of particularity, is one of the main parts of my forthcoming whatever-it-is.
[3] Howard had taken the opportunity to have a quick nap during my own talk. One apparent consequence of Howard's sleep disorder, which prevents him from sleeping more than a few hours a night, is that you had better keep his attention, or he might nod off. I was not unaware that I had in fact lost his attention because he was sitting in the front row, directly in front of me, beside Sam Ajzenstat--who, I think, at that time, I still didn't know had been Howard's friend from highschool; learning that helped explain Howard's having not hesitated to pick up the phone and call Sam, the first time I met Howard and happened to tell him that my MA thesis defense hadn't gone very well and that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee (and I hasten to note that its not having gone well was nothing to do with Sam, who stuck around when it was over to try to help me past it), to ask what had gone wrong. Thankfully, Sam didn't answer. Anyway, at the end of my talk, Sam nudged him awake. And so I wasn't surprised, or offended, when Howard completely misrepresented my talk in his commentary. Come to think of it, though, I don't think it's ever occurred to me before that he may have been making a little joke: according to his summary, my talk was about students making sacrifices of their work to their teachers.
[4] And you don't have to tell me that neither of these things is anything to be proud of--and yet, in that sense of having a bit of your sense of self staked on something that I was relating pride to before, in a way I am proud of these things. But more on that, also, later.
Currently at Havelock: -4.3. High today: 6.4. First thunderstorms of the year around 5 this morning, just after the temperature broke freezing after a night of light freezing rain.
This is a way in which Howard's example is useful again and again--if there is something that should be done, you don't just do it or fail to do it; you find a way for it to be done, and you revise the way along the way. Sometimes this means only playing the part that you can play and not taking the whole task on yourself. In the second of the courses I took with him Howard told us that when he arrived at the University of Toronto as an undergrad, he saw the library in his college--the main, downtown campus of U. of Toronto comprises a number of affiliated "colleges", each with their own particular history and character--and thought it was the library, and so he thought he could read all the books in the library, and learn virtually everything there was to know. Then he discovered the central library for the whole university. And, he told us, he was depressed for a week. What was the point of reading anything if he couldn't even scratch the surface of everything? But then, he told us, he realized he didn't have to do it all himself. Different people can read different books and learn from each other--they can all delegate the work to each other. Howard told this story in a mixed graduate/honours-undergraduate class, as he was assigning a group project in which we grad students would use the undergrads as research assistants. I probably don't have to tell you that I found this horrifying. But the particularities of my psychology notwithstanding, the point was well made and well taken.
That said, psychological particularities matter. That's actually something I felt Howard to be maybe insufficiently sensitive about back then. I'll always remember being in his house, in his study, for a seminar meeting that happened there for some reason, and him telling us, for some reason to do with our upcoming seminar presentations, that no one ever actually died of embarrassment. I did not accept this as a fact (although, as it happens, seminar presentations were one of the kinds of things, like karaoke singing, about which my social anxiety conspicuously and curiously didn't particularly disable me), and, anyway, whether or not anyone ever dies of embarrassment, certainly some people are more prone to dying of embarrassment than others, and sometimes it's good to devise workarounds for that. (But then again sometimes the best workaround is to deny that anyone ever dies of embarrassment.) But then in 2015 Howard posted a blog series about shame, in which he was very hard (harder than I would be, but this is one of those things I'll get around to talking about, uh, lentement[1]) on shame and humiliation ... and one of his recurring themes these last few years is the psychological particularities that are supposedly due to birth order. And another of the things I always remember of Howard: at the conference I helped organize for his retirement, Claudio Duran, whom Howard had helped secure employment at York so that he could escape from Chile after Pinochet's coup, a very gentle and generous man who was also on my dissertation committee, was to give a talk but was overcome with emotion and couldn't speak. At the end of the conference, Howard gave a talk that was a commentary on, in turn, every one of the preceding presentations over the two days of the conference.[2] He told a story about himself and Claudio, about a time not long after Claudio arrived at York, when Howard had said something critical of something Claudio had said--I feel like this may have been in a course of Claudio's that Howard sat in on, but I'm not sure. I don't remember what Howard said about Claudio's reaction, but I'll always remember the way he said what it made him realize: "I hurt him." The way he said it indicated both puzzlement and empathy, and a concession that sometimes you have to make concessions to people's psychological particularities, and that doing so maybe does not come so naturally to him.[3]
Anyway: I am not inclined to delegate to other people (and for that matter I'm not all that inclined to being delegated to, either[4]), at least not directly (because, after all, one way or another, we all do, whether together or apart), so the problem has to be dealt with in other ways. One way is to allow for the project's taking a long time. (This is one of those things that in some ways I obviously have a problem with, in the typical way of the kid for whom things came too easy too soon and so can't handle it when things get hard, and in other ways comes very easily to me, as when I grow trees from seed and plant seedlings that will fulfill their intended purpose, if they ever do at all, years and years and years from now. Which is to say, it's one of those things about me that you could easily see only one side of or the other, and so different people could form opposite impressions of what I'm like in that regard. (I don't mean to suggest that I'm all that unusual in that way, although I do suspect that I am unusually inclined not to deny one side or the other of the various tensions in my personality. I am at least resistant to the mania for self-categorization that seems so widespread (though how can I trust myself to say that about myself? (and I can quickly pile up counterexamples ... )), but maybe it's just that the self-categorizers are so noisy about it. (And of course maybe they're so noisy about it because they're so unsure of themselves. Some of them. Maybe.))) I do need to read the bible in a year, if I'm going to read it at all, but this project of, uh, re-writing it can't be done in a year, both in the sense that it is impossible for me to do it in the space of one year (and will become especially impossible once the downtimes of most of my other projects are over), and in the sense that it can't be done once and for all anyway. As I used to tell my students, you've got to carry it out with you into the world; you've got to let the text and the world work on each other.
The thing I worry about, though, about not re-writing it as I'm reading, is that, as I said, it'll slip through my fingers. But I know from experience that much of what I write will slip through my fingers, too, and some time later I will read what I've written and be surprised I'd ever thought that, or disappointed that what I thought I'd just thought up for the first time I had also thought up long ago. I think now and then of a time I happened to be sitting on a plane next to a guy I was slightly acquainted with; we were both going to the same conference. I learned then that he was a Rheostatics fan, a bigger and older Rheostatics fan than I was. It was a short flight and we talked a bit about what we do. We got talking about something to do with Rawls; he'd published a paper about something to do with Rawls, and I asked him something about what he thought about something, and he said something like, "Let me try to remember what I said about that." I felt like you shouldn't have to try to remember what you said about something in order to say what you think about it, but of course I find myself doing that, too, and it bothers me when I do it. I start saying something and then realize that, no wait, actually I thought a different thing about that. When that happens the whole "I think that" thing feels like it's shown up as artificial--like if the thoughts you think don't come to you spontaneously then they're artificial and somehow not really yours, even if you thunk em up yourself. In some way that's probably a bit of romanticism I'd be better off without, and it's certainly unfair to criticize anyone for trying to think of what the position they thought up for themselves on anything is, but there's at least something to it, and I suppose what there is to it is something along the lines of having positions being sophistry, although sophistry is all right as long as you don't get attached to it: positions are partial, and you need to have them since there's no way to the whole except by way of the parts, but you need to not mistake parts for the whole.
Anyway, what I know is that while most of it slips away in any event you have to keep coming back to it and have faith that, over time, it grows.
So now I've used up pretty much all the time I can use for today on a meta-commentary that I maybe would've better spent on the commentary, but one other meta-comment I was going to make is this: if I'm going to keep this up in some way, probably the best thing to do is pick out one thing in the day's text that seems like the thing. Everything else can wait if it has to, and chances are good that next year some one of them will have come to seem like the thing. The one thing I have been meaning to say about Isaac, which I don't have time now to elaborate on but really only needs to be set down as a marker anyway, is that with Isaac, love shows up in the Hebrew bible: the first time the Hebrew word for "love" appears is when God tells Abraham, "Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you." The next time it appears is when Rebekah comes to Isaac and he loves her. Then Isaac loves Esau, but Rebekah loves Jacob. And then, funnily enough, since "Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game," Isaac tells Esau to go out hunting and then make him the dish that he loves, and then he will give Esau his blessing. (Howard, I saw today, suggests that Isaac tells Esau to go out hunting to get him out of the house so as to facilitate the supposed subterfuge that results in Jacob getting the blessing supposedly intended for Esau.) Hebrew, apparently, doesn't have different words for the love of a man for a woman, for a son, and for a fine Cuban cigar.
And then once Jacob takes centre stage, the whole thing practically turns into a soap opera of love and hate. I keep thinking that if you ever bought into the idea that the French troubadors of the Renaissance invented romantic love, as I used to be at least open to doing, you ought to read these chapters of Genesis about Isaac and Jacob. (I also keep thinking that my girlfriend when I was an undergrad told me that an English prof of hers had said that Chaucer and his buddies invented romantic love "as a lark", but then remembering that it was actually Valentine's Day. Or something.)
One last thing, before I forget, and until I forget again: another thing I came across in Howard's blog today was him saying that he generally figures that the ages given for people around the time of Abraham and Isaac are (for whatever reason) doubled, so that Isaac was actually twenty rather than forty when Rebekah became his wife, and so on. Several hours later (while I was washing my hands; how much thinking I'd get done if I could just spend all my time washing my hands!) I realized that that would make nonsense of what Howard says about Abraham being a feeble old man of over a hundred when he binds Isaac, it being absurd that Sarah could be sexually attractive to Abimelech, and so forth. Of course, Howard's interpretations don't hang together. Why expect them to?
I just (well, you know, six hours ago now) turned on the CBC music "revival hour" stream that, last time I was listening to it, played something I said reminded me of Alkan, and now, of course, the first thing it plays is Alkan. All part of God's plan. By which I mean the Doctor's. Bloody dream crabs. ("Funeral March for the Death of a Parrot", I have finally gotten google to translate the title as. Well! I never wanted to do this in the first place. I wanted to be ... a lumberjack!)
[1] Lest anyone get the wrong idea, "Lent" is actually a Germanic word, not a Romantic one, and has to do with springtime, not slowness.
[2] Another thing I always remember of Howard is his telling me, at the end of our first meeting, not to be afraid to use him; "I'm not a Kantian," he said. I think I've noted before that learning of Howard's old friendship with Sam Ajzenstat suggested to me that Howard's non-Kantianism, or at least his inclination to frame himself as a non-Kantian, was directly related to Sam's Kantianism. Anyway, "you can't just use people", according to Kant, amounts to the same thing as saying that everything you do, if it is to be morally acceptable, must be, in essence, universalizable--that it must be just the kind of thing that anyone in a situation such as you are in ought to do. Kierkegaard's assault on that idea, in defense of particularity, is one of the main parts of my forthcoming whatever-it-is.
[3] Howard had taken the opportunity to have a quick nap during my own talk. One apparent consequence of Howard's sleep disorder, which prevents him from sleeping more than a few hours a night, is that you had better keep his attention, or he might nod off. I was not unaware that I had in fact lost his attention because he was sitting in the front row, directly in front of me, beside Sam Ajzenstat--who, I think, at that time, I still didn't know had been Howard's friend from highschool; learning that helped explain Howard's having not hesitated to pick up the phone and call Sam, the first time I met Howard and happened to tell him that my MA thesis defense hadn't gone very well and that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee (and I hasten to note that its not having gone well was nothing to do with Sam, who stuck around when it was over to try to help me past it), to ask what had gone wrong. Thankfully, Sam didn't answer. Anyway, at the end of my talk, Sam nudged him awake. And so I wasn't surprised, or offended, when Howard completely misrepresented my talk in his commentary. Come to think of it, though, I don't think it's ever occurred to me before that he may have been making a little joke: according to his summary, my talk was about students making sacrifices of their work to their teachers.
[4] And you don't have to tell me that neither of these things is anything to be proud of--and yet, in that sense of having a bit of your sense of self staked on something that I was relating pride to before, in a way I am proud of these things. But more on that, also, later.
Currently at Havelock: -4.3. High today: 6.4. First thunderstorms of the year around 5 this morning, just after the temperature broke freezing after a night of light freezing rain.