Monday, November 4, 2013
Monday, March 15, 2010
A NEW NOVEL
...an island, an entity....
ancient picaresque tale Satyricon, by Petronius.
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end,
And all is always now.
ENDINGS
Only a wan shudder of heat lightning silhouetted the distant horizon, glowering beyond the phosphorescent city far across the wide water.
The island lay darkly enthralled in its vast deep indigo embrace, dreaming of another dawning day of high summer: Pampered Capri people indulging the timeless Italian art of opulent oblivion.
Dolce farniente...
Yet, just as night was giving way to the first ray of ruddy tincture, not all Capresi were so quiescent. Muffled scuffling urgency kicked up a haze of dust at the very apex of the isle, verging its sheerest cliff.
A slack male form spiraled out, fleetingly eclipsed the burning cusp of the rising sun, flung disjointedly out, arcing and plunging headlong towards the cove, hundreds of feet down.
Below, on board a cluster of pleasure-craft anchored there for the night, no one noticed the silent drop. At that hour, they lay still rapt in sun-baked slumber, even if a few drowsy dreamers, stirring on one of the larger yachts, might have sensed the scraping thump as a flailing limb grazed its railing. Some might also have dimly registered the final splash, only to turn aside and go on drifting in languorous semi-consciousness, imagining it to be most likely just some rubble, dislodged from the immense limestone crag looming over the huddle of tiny vessels suspended in crystalline turquoise.
It wasn't until afterward, following a lazy pranzo, that a leisurely check revealed dried bloody streaks, and only then did they grasp that something made of flesh had caused the trifling commotion.
In late afternoon, squinting molten glare refracting obliquely off choppy waters, when the port police hoisted the pallid figure up from the purple floor of the sea, a murmuring crowd of the curious had gathered. The first macabre revelation set everyone buzzing: A heavy iron object trussed round his loins with maroon silk. The second sight wrenched shocked gasps from some, nauseous retches from others: The livid proof of the most savage and perverse mutilation...
The grotesque horror of the young man's fate ricocheted jaggedly around the isle in ensuing days, escalating to wild rumor among the alarmed islanders and the terrorized visitors: "Who was he?" "Who had seen him?" And most chillingly, "Who had been with him?"
Bay of Naples, Late Afternoon, 30 July
A vaporous shroud pervaded the glassy-flat Bay of Naples as a hydrofoil glided along the surface like a monstrous water-skimming beetle, its metallic carapace glinting, toward Capri.
One of its passengers, an American named Webb Knecht, strained to make out the unique contour of the storied isle, which now shimmered dreamlike into focus.
To the left, there emerged the vertical profile of the promontory where the Roman Emperor Tiberius had sited his magnificent and infamous Villa Iovis, the House of Jove, largest of a dozen palaces he had placed around the island.
To the right, Webb could just make out the more imposing peak of Monte Solaro. It was from there, according to the sketchy and horrific reports Webb had received, that his brother Derek's naked, disfigured body had evidently been thrown, once his killers had finished with him.
The sleek aliscafo was now bearing rapidly for the lower, middle portion of the roughly saddle-shaped mass of white rocky outcropping that formed the island. It would soon dock at Marina Grande and he would take a taxi up the winding road to the Villa del Ponente, the Villa of the West Wind. It was reputedly a historic mock-Moorish mansion, a white-stucco and red-tile palace, ideally situated to afford unforgettable panoramas all around the points of the compass. Inexplicably, a Neapolitan nobleman, whom he had yet to meet, Baron Gaetano Alfanic, had offered him the use of the villa's tower apartment. Webb so far understood only one thing: The Baron had learned of his brother's appalling death and had immediately contacted him in San Francisco. Alfanic had not revealed how he had discovered Derek's identity - or, for that matter, how he had found Webb's phone number - but had simply said that he wanted to do whatever he could to help, and to uncover the truth about what had happened.
Derek, dead now at twenty-five, had been Webb's older brother by three years, and they had been as close as twins. Like many twins, they had developed their own coded language in childhood and had shared a powerful telepathic connection, as well - a deep and dynamic bond Webb now missed terribly, as if there were a cold wind howling in desolate despair through the very core of his being.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
SPRING CONCERT
SUNDAY, 21 MARCH, 8 PM
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Excerpt from "Achever Clausewitz" [French title]
From René Girard’s Battling to the End: Politics, War, and Apocalypse forthcoming from Michigan State University Press this fall. Copyright by Michigan State University, 2009. Reproduced by permission.
If we had said in the 1980s that Islamism would play the role it plays today, people would have thought we were crazy. Yet the ideology promoted by Stalin already contained para-religious components that foreshadowed the increasingly radical contamination that has occurred over time. Europe was less malleable in Napoleon’s time. After Communism, its vulnerability has returned to that of a medieval village facing the Vikings. The Arab conquest was a shock, while the French Revolution was slowed by the nationalism that it provoked across Europe. In its first historical deployment, Islam conquered religiously. This was its strength and it also explains the solidity of its roots. The revolutionary impetus accelerated by the Napoleonic era was checked by the equilibrium among nations. However, nations became inflamed in turn, and destroyed the only possible means of stopping revolutions from happening.
We therefore have to radically change the way we think, and try to understand the situation without any presuppositions and using all the resources available from the study of Islam. The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic tool, the new face of the trend to extremes. Even though there are no longer any archaic religions, it is as if a new one had arisen built on the back of the Bible, a slightly transformed Bible. It would be an archaic religion strengthened by aspects of the Bible and Christianity. Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself prior to that rejection.
Of course, there is resentment in its attitude to Judeo-Christianity and the West, but it is also a new religion. This cannot be denied. Historians of religion, and even anthropologists, have to show how and why it emerged. Indeed, some aspects of this religion contain a relationship to violence that we do not understand and that are all the more worrying for that reason. For us, it makes no sense to be ready to pay with one’s life for the pleasure of seeing the other die. We do not know whether such phenomena belong to a special psychology or not. We are thus facing complete failure; we cannot talk about it and also we cannot document the situation because terrorism is something new that exploits Islamic codes, but does not at all belong to classical Islamic theory. Today’s terrorism is new, even from an Islamic point of view. It is a modern effort to counter the most powerful and refined tool of the Western world: technology. It counters technology in a way that we do not understand, and that classical Islam may not understand either.
Thus, it is not enough to simply condemn the attacks. The defensive thought by which we oppose the phenomenon does not necessarily embody a desire to understand. Often it even reveals a desire to not understand, or an intention to comfort oneself. Clausewitz is easier to integrate into a historical development. He gives us the intellectual tools to understand the violent escalation. However, where do we find such ideas in Islam? Modern resentment never leads all the way to suicide. Thus we do not have the analogical structures that could help us to understand. I am not saying that they are not possible, that they will not appear, but I admit my inability to grasp them. This is why our explanations often belong to the province of fraudulent propaganda against Muslims.
THE POWER & DANGER OF IMITATION
René Girard from Michael Sugrue on Vimeo.
He is one of the most recognizable, if largely unrecognized, superstars on the Stanford campus: The shock of white hair, the strikingly deep-set eyes beneath dark eyebrows are unmistakable. René Girard is one of only 40 members, or immortels, of the Académie Française, France's highest intellectual honor. He has taught here for 30 years, but the emeritus French professor admits that few people here understand quite what he does.
Girard's work crosses the fields of literature, anthropology, theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology. His brainchild, the mimetic theory, emphasizes the role of imitation in our lives, as an effect and a behavior and a motivation. Toddlers learn to talk by imitation; we learn a foreign language by imitation. But mimesis is not only the way we learn—it's also the way we fight. We compete; we want what our brother has; we "keep up with the Joneses." Girard's theory—a long thought played out over decades—suggests that mimesis is the basis of all human conflict, and that the resolution of conflict through the public sacrifice of a scapegoat was the very foundation of archaic religions and civilizations. But the ancient formula no longer works, he says. The world may be headed for an impasse.
