admiration mayonnaise (alternate title: 'herself a law')

I think upon our heroes with great admiration mayonnaise.  real: extra heavy. 

no I saw this on the street & almost had to be hospitalized.  admiration mayonnaise.  so good.  it reminded me of, deep in bushwick, there's a legendary sign painted on a high wall of a building that reads paramount tortellini.  you can go there, it's great to see the words paramount tortellini & it offers the pleasure of being a secret place in the city.  but admiration mayonnaise, besides being the one & only admiration mayonnaise, was such a nice surprise.

thank you, admiration mayonnaise.

also did you know the word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole & means literally sri lankanness?  is that not the most ickety & colonial thing you have ever heard?

this very interesting article made me sad.  they have this beautiful silence room but they use it to sell products.  still, I like the aristotelian question of "metaphors for what sound should, well, sound like."  I like the pictures.  I would like very much to need a chair in this deep & tiny room.

Clayton Eshleman, speaking of his burgeoning interest in the art of the upper paleolithic:

Before returning to the Dordogne in 1978, I read an essay, later published as a book, by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman, called "The Dream and the Underworld."  Hillman was not concerned with prehistory in this work, but what he had to say about dreams and the way we have used them suggested a way for me to begin to think about cave imagery. 

According to Hillman, modern people have interpreted their dreams and treated them as a reflection of daylight and daytime activities, thus denying them an autonomous realm, an archetypal place that corresponds with a distinct mythic geography -- in short, an underworld that is not merely a reflection or diminution of an empirical sense world.  I was astonished!  This was exactly the same kind of interpretation that had been cast over the Upper Paleolithic caves.  Like Plato's allegory of the cave, the caves, since the discovery of prehistory in the mid-nineteenth century, were thought to contain a world of shadows in contrast to a "real" sunlit world of higher good above them. 

It was not a matter of merely reversing such a verdict, but of acknowledging how the mysterious animals, human forms, and signs behind what might be called "the history of image" might pre-figure a way to dream and imagine.  In a contemporary way, Upper Paleolithic cave imagery is a language upon which all subsequent mythology has been built.  From my point of view, the distinction between history and prehistory started to look like the distinction between poetry and prose at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Of course Cro-Magnon people were affected by all that was in and around them, and undoubtedly they brought their desire to live -- to kill, eat, and wear animals -- into the depths of the caves.  But the work on the cave walls has behind it a much more formidable crisis than depicting game. 

After I crawled for four hours in Le Portel or Les Trois Frères, I realized that "sympathetic magic" and "sexual pairing" interpretations had only skimmed what has been recorded.  There I glimpsed outlines of isolated animals (with only several possible exceptions, no hunter/animal juxtapositions occur until after the Upper Paleolithic), or crouched before friezes of hundreds of entangled animal figures, sometimes scratched on one great bison outline, as if the earth were seen as a ripe pelt of animals.  I saw within this labyrinth little half-human animals beginning to appear, more often than not as mere dancing mites.  I felt that I was witnessing the result of the crisis of Upper Paleolithic people separating the animal out of their about-to-be human heads, and that what we call "the underworld" has, as its impulse, such a catastrophe behind it.

reading this, I'm reminded that our word autonomous, in its original greek form (αυτονομος), was invented by Sophocles, a gift to his Antigone.  Antigone is sentenced to be sealed up in the cave, alive, a punishment for burying her dead brother against the theban king's wishes.  a chorus croons her the news that what she did was right, but that her tragic flaw, αυτογνωσις, autognosis, has set her afoul of the sovereign & spelled her end.  translators varyingly have given autognosis as 'self-determination', 'stubborn mood, self-chosen', or 'self-will', & the simple meaning of the familiar greek would be self-wisdom ("or, as we might say, ego strength").  then, in being sent, alive, to the underworld, the chorus tells her that she goes to the land of shades αυτονομος, autonomous, sometimes 'of her own motion', but literally 'self-lawing' or 'herself a law'.  that is, she will be alive in the land of the dead.  drawing breath in the underworld, diving into the knot, catastrophic impulse of differentiation.

the exhilarating anthropologist Michael Jackson (listen, what do you want from me?) writes:

"Fetish" comes from the Latin facticius ("to do"), though the earliest English use of the word, in the late fifteenth century, dervies from the Portugese word feitiço, which was applied to the "charms" used by Africans on the Guinea coast.  The archetypical fetish was possibly the BaKongo nkisi (plural: minkisi) from the region that today encompasses Cabinda and western Zaire. 

The word enters European discourse with pejorative connotations, a synonym for idolatry, primitivism, and savagery.  Early anthropologists such as Tylor and Frazer considered fetishism to be a form of irrationalism, magic, and superstition precisely because it denied or blurred the distinction between persons and things.  How can an inanimate object be imbued with intentionality and moral consciousness, addressed, fed, and cared for as though it were human? 

They protested too much.  Those who were most repelled and outraged by the African's apparent indifference to the ontological divide between persons and things were, as often as not, engaged in the kind of colonial ventures -- such as slave trading -- that conspicuously reduced Africans to the status of beasts, chattels, and mere things.  Moreover, the European Enlightenment's excoriation of anthropomorphism was from the outset a rhetorical device for concealing its pervasive presence in European discourse.  In fact, in no human society is it possible to draw anything but a transient and ambiguous line between subject and object.  In our practical lives, the line is infringed continually.  The field of intersubjectivity inescapably involves an ongoing reciprocal movement in consciousness between a sense of being a subject for oneself and being an object for others. 

A rejoinder to this point of view would be to admit that we often liken persons to things and things to persons, but that this should not be taken to imply that we confuse them.  It is a matter of metaphor, so to speak, not a reflection of how we think things really are.
But the pathetic fallacy that erases the distinction between subject and object issues from direct experience and is not conjured out of nowhere -- a mere figure of speech.  Similes that merge persons and things are grounded in our continually shifting sense of ourselves as having and not having autonomy, of being embodied and disembodied, of acting and of being acted upon.  And the similes arise in specific contexts, and have to be understood as such. 

Consider Kuranko thought on this subject.  If sacrifice is a form of gift giving that opens and clears paths between people, creating transparency and reciprocity, fetishes work to seal off, enclose, safeguard, and protect.  Accordingly, Kuranko social life vacillates between openness and closure.  For every adage that encourages generosity of spirit (morgoye), there is one that extols guardedness. 

Yani wolen na don sise na don (literally, "let the chicken rather than the bushfowl eat it") -- rather than give to a stranger, give to someone you know so that the gift will come back to you. 

Ni ya bolo kolon kononto ko i lile mala a tan nyorgo la (literally, "if you give to nine poor people you'll be the tenth to be poor") -- don't be so generous as to leave yourself in need. 

Thus while gifts and sacrifices serve to clear channels of communication, fetishes serve to monitor and reinforce boundaries where uncontrolled traffic jeopardizes a person's sense of autonomy and threatens his or her secuity.  The difference between fetish and gift is that the fetish withholds or prevents communication, sealing self off from other, while the gift opens and mediates communication.  The fetish closes gates; the gift opens paths. 

However, in no human society are people so open to others that they are able to forfeit their self-identity completely.  Even the most charitable and self-sacrificing individual feels personally gratified or somehow saved by giving unstintingly.  Without possessing some sense of ontological security and substantiality, others are experienced as destabilizing influences or threats.  For the Kuranko, fetishes may be understood as a specific instance of the imperative to "have miran," that is, to be self-contained and self-possessed.  The analogy is with a container like a calabash or a country pot.  Thus miran can denote qualities such as self-confidence, self-possession, a commanding presence, and charisma, as well as material possessions, particularly those things that bolster one's sense of self-containedness and autonomy -- personal property, clothing, a dwelling or granary, protective charms, and magical ointments. 

Just as these things can be stolen or spoiled, so too can a person's self-confidence and sense of autonomy be taken away.  Miran, like mana for the Polynesians, is continually waxing and waning. 

To strengthen miran the Kuranko have recourse to fetishes and magical medicines that boost their sense of substantiality or, as we might say, ego strength.  When used to protect farms, villages, or chiefdoms, they act as symbolic containers, rendering that unit of social space impermeable to unlicensed extraneous influence.  Commonly known throughout West Africa as jujus (from the French jou-jou), among the Kuranko these magical artifacts include guardian angels (kanda malika), djinn (nyenne), and magical medicines (bese).  In short, though some are man-made objects and others are quasi-human, all are considered to have the ability to bolster the power of one's own will.

all this hot fetish action reminds me a favorite scene from the torah, genesis 31.  Jacob has been working twenty years for his shifty Aramean father-in-law, Laban.  Laban is a kind of a good old boy, a rich, elite yokel, & crooked to the bone.  Jacob and Laban first meet when Jacob falls in love with Rachel, Laban's younger daughter (her name means ewe), and asks Laban to marry her.  Laban sets the bride-price at seven years' labor on his estate, which Jacob dutifully performs.  But then, in some Scott-Walker-level dirty dealings (sorry had to), Laban pulls a devious switcheroo: and since the bride's face is hidden behind a veil, not until it's too late does Jacob realize he's been married instead to Rachel's older, uglier sister Leah (whose name means, sorrrry but, cow).  Jacob then works another seven years so he can marry the sister he really loves, and afterwards he stays around, caring after Laban's flocks, for another six years.  during those six years, Laban repeatedly tries to cheat Jacob out of his fair share, but Jacob continually wins thru magic & cunning, and amasses much of his father-in-law's fortune.

finally, one day, Jacob overhears Laban's sons fuming over how much of their inheritance Jacob has taken, and he decides it's time to get the hell out of dodge.  he gathers up his family and their belongings.  without telling anyone (& sans textual explanation), Rachel also steals התרפים אשר לאביה, hat'rafim asher l'aviha, 'the idols of her father'.  then they leave.  (the torah at genesis 31:20 also uses the celebrated phrase ויגנב יעקב את-לב לבן, vayig'nov ya'akov et-lev laban, literally 'and Jacob stole Laban's heart'.  the heart being, in the ancient hebrew worldview, the bodily seat of cognition & knowledge, this is generally interpreted to mean 'Jacob kept Laban from knowing', ie 'Jacob kept his plan to run off a secret'.  but I can't help doubting that's the only intended meaning -- I mean, he's disappearing with the guy's daughters!)

a few days later, Laban realizes what's happened and sets after them, catching up in the hill country of gilead.  he corners Jacob and excoriates him in a passage (gen 31:30) celebrated in the talmud for its colloquialism (even now, the hebrew reads a little like seinfeld banter: 'you wanna leave?  so leave!'), ending with the question למה גנבת את-אלהי, lamah ganav'ta et-elohai, that is, 'but why'd you have to take my gods?!'  (the word Laban uses for gods here is nearly identical to אלהים, elohim, used as God's name for much of genesis.)  Jacob, who doesn't know about Rachel's theft, insists he had the right to run away, but swears he knows nothing of the gods being taken and promises to kill the thief if he's discovered.  & Laban starts rummaging thru Jacob's stuff, looking for his idols.

things here get pretty cinematic.  Rachel, on seeing her father sifting thru the camp, quickly palms the idols & stuffs them into her camel-hair menstrual pillow.  when her dad makes his way into the tent she tells him she can't stand up because she's got her period.  so Laban looks everywhere except the right place, and finds nothing.  Jacob explodes into anger and seethes at Laban: מה-מצאת מכל כלי-ביתך, mah-matsata mikol k'ley-vaytekha, that is, 'so what have you found of those household things of yours?'  not idols (תרפים) or gods (אלהי), but things (כלי).

did I mention Laban means white?  it does.  (cf arabic لبنة, labneh).  admiration labneh.

(actually that's the origin of the word lebanon too, I guess originally in reference to snow-capped mount lebanon?)

Virgil in the aeneid writes:

sacra suosque tibi commendat troia penates
hos cape fatorum comites... 

and holy troy commends its household gods to you,
accept them as the retinue of fate...

I'm gonna stop now.  listen, are you reading this?  you are, we both know you are.  please, please, won't you send me an email, or write me a blog comment or two, & let me know how this is sounding to you? I haven't left the house in weeks.  for all I know, nothing is real.  don't turn your head into birds, please, let's hear from you!

a parting thought on politics: