How Long Has This Been Going On: Selected Essays 2001-2011 by Paul Kahn

How Long Has This Been Going On Collected Essays 2000-2011 (revised, January 2012) Paul Kahn

Copyright Paul Kahn, 2012 Parts of this book have appeared in the following publications: NEW Magazine 4_2008 (Paris) Projekty i bazgroły / Projects and Doodles by Krzysztof Lenk, słowo/obraz terytoria, 2010 (Warsaw), UX Storytellers: connecting the dots, 2010 (Berlin) Kyoto Journal, 2009 (Kyoto) Toronto Studies in Central and Inner Asia, No. 6, 2004 (Toronto) Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, 2009 (Washington Jacket 28 & Jacket 33 (jacket2.org) Cerise Press, 2012 (www.cerisepress.com) My thanks to the generous editors and friends who made these first publication possible – Krzysztof Lenk, Jan Jursa, Ken Rogers, Michael Gervers, William Fitzhugh, John Tratner, Fiona Sze-Lorrain – and to the readers who make the writing possible – Dominique Negel, James Koller, Norman Fischer, Etel Adnan and Dan Russell. Cover photo by the author.

Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

Paul Kahn

How Long Has This Been Going On Collected Essays 2000-2011

Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare: Looking Back on Bob Dylan 5 Reading The Book of Marco Polo

The Geometry of Time, After Piero della Francesca (a fiction) 53 Centennial Sauvage: the survival of Tristes Tropique 83 What Tesla Taught Coleridge: Learning from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen 111 The Seduction of Yusuf by Zulaykha

135

PAUL KAHN is saying [about Krzysztof Lenk] :

151

Learning Information Architecture

155

The Central Question: the introduction to Misunderstanding Mongolia 163 A Review: The Secret History of the Mongols by Igor de Rachewiltz

167

Introduction to “The Secret History of the Mongols”

185

Driving A Truck Through A Sway Among A Swarm: I Was Blown Back by Norman Fischer 196 Recent Books by James Koller

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200

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Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare: Looking Back on Bob Dylan

All song lyrics by Bob Dylan are copied from the texts available on the Bob Dylan website: http://www.bobdylan.com

opposite: still from Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home, Paramount, 2005

Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall, notes by Sean Wilentz, Columbia Legacy (CD), 2004

Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

1. In The Year(s) of Bob Dylan … Early one morning the sun was shining I was laying in bed

I woke up one morning, maybe it was back in 2005, and with no special announcement, no special occasion, and no clear evidence of planning it seemed to be the Year of Bob Dylan. It was not even clear when it began. The calendar now reads 2008 and it is not clear when it will end. Like a movie already in progress, I came in to find the theater dark and images flashing on the wall. At this point in time, I don’t even remember the order in which the images appeared. The order matters less than the sudden glut of availability. What was not there for so many decades is now on the market. As a result, the past is present in ways it had not been for decades. A collective Old Man was re-playing his past, talking to his collective Self. Do you remember? these pieces of evidence seem to ask. Do you want to try to understand, do you want to see what it looked like and hear what it sounded like? And for those of you who couldn’t possibly remember a time before you were born, do you want to know where this collective Self came from? I was 15 years old, standing in the music store after a trumpet lesson, waiting for a ride home, staring at the poster pinned to the wall advertising new releases from Columbia Records. There’s a picture of a skinny young man standing on a stage with his harmonica rack and guitar under the title Bob Dylan In Concert. The announced recording was never released. And then the piece of evidence disappeared. Then one morning, there it was. The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall, a full concert recording from a period that previously existed only in the memory of the audience that saw Dylan in those three short years when he was the Wunderkind folk singer of Greenwich Village. Who was waiting to hear this evening? Who wanted to read Sean Wilentz, now a Professor of History (slash American Studies) at Princeton University, whose family ran the Eighth Street Bookstore a few blocks north of

Washington Square, describing the event? Sean Wilentz’s father and uncle ran the store, co-published a series of poetry books with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) under the name Totem/Corinth, books that in retrospect seem like gems of early work by great American poets – Philip Whalen, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, Edward Dorn – who all led or still live long and complicated lives. I am thinking about The War on a spring afternoon in 1969 during a weekend foray into the Village from the Westchester suburbs. I walk past the NYU houses of Henry James’ Washington Square to the Eighth Street Bookstore to find Planet News from Allen Ginsberg. I walk into Village Voice, the English-language bookstore in Paris, and there is an enormous book titled Dylan’s Vision of Sin. Many books proposing to tell the story of Dylan’s life or the meaning hidden in his songs had appeared before, but this one seemed to be different. The biographical note about the author, Christopher Ricks, informs the reader that “in 2004, he was elected the Oxford Professor of Poetry”. Christopher Ricks is a man who has edited the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot and written books on John Keats and Samuel Beckett. His attention span had previously covered the Romantics to the Early PostModern. Now he was extending himself into the Contemporary. If this man was writing about Bob Dylan’s songs – and that was the sole subject of his book – then these songs must be English literature. All this confluence of back-filling the past and literary analysis might have been sheer coincidence if, on what seems like the very same morning, Chronicles, Volume One had not also appeared. Dylan himself was writing about his past, creating a memoir about how he became the character that wrote and performed the songs for which he is now well known. The writing makes it clear that in his seventh decade he has very clear memories. He maintains tremendous authority and control over these memories, in much the same way he maintains control over his recordings, films, paintings, and private affairs, and uses them to some purpose. The chronology of the narrative is both precise and fragmented, leaping across decades to describe both an origin and a process. The weather visible out the window of an apartment on a particular evening is quite clear. Exactly what preceded or followed that meteorological event is not. The books pulled by an autodidact from a friend’s library, a blend of Classical Greek history and German military technique, are described in some detail. The subject of the narrative is the creation of a persona, an account of the influences he wove to create a body of work that continues to tour the world in the form of

Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Vision of Sin, Ecco/ Harper Collins, 2005

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, Simon & Schuster, 2004

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Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Faber & Faber, 2005

Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home, Paramount, 2005

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a performance artist and inhabit the minds inside a million heads. The momentum continued as a decade-nostalgia for the hopeful revolutionary 1960s began to spread (it is interesting to note how we like to remember revolutionary times as hopeful rather than desperate). With a sense of timing that could only have been organized by an adroit book editor, Greil Marcus’ extended essay, Like A Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, appeared to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Dylan’s anomalous popular single. Marcus does his best to recreate this summer of 1965 event – the recording, release, and ascent to the top of the American pop music charts of “Like A Rolling Stone” where it still resides, firmly lodged in the granite edifice of Classic 60s Rock playlists. Marcus paints a portrait of a long poem, a text neither he nor anyone else has ever seen (another piece of evidence withheld), confronting a recording session with ambitious young musicians trying to discover what they should sound like, a play managed by those invisible directors of creation, the session producer and artist’s manager who, like the publisher-editor or the gallerist and art critic, illuminate and insinuate their presence into what we see as the final work. The foundations of this past were more firmly established when No Direction Home was broadcast in the US and England and quickly published on DVD. The documentary tells the story of Bob Dylan’s life from childhood in Minnesota to his time in New York’s Greenwich Village music scene to his electric band tours that ended in 1966. So once again we are presented with a wrap-up that ends with a year an even number of decades (four) in the past. Dylan appears in interviews, looking like he does in the 21st century, describing this carefully circumscribed part of his past. He is forcefully supported by footage of performances, press conferences, and the brilliantly captured moments in parties, hotel rooms, and limousines filmed by D.A. Pennebacker. His current reflections on the past are remarkably cogent and clear. The same can be said of all the people who participated in this conventional exercise in oral history, from Dave Van Ronk to Susie Rotollo to Paul Nelson to Tony Glover to Joan Baez to Allen Ginsberg to Izzy Young to John Cohen to Bob Neuwirth. Everyone was there and, unlike certain Presidents of the United States, all have a clear memory. Everyone knows what part of the drama they witnessed. No Direction Home, made in 2005 and broadcast in 2006, is the past framed by the future. Allen Ginsberg had died in 1997, Dave Van Ronk in 2002. The interview footage must have been carefully gathered for over a decade by Bob Dylan’s organization. Martin Scorsese is credited as director

and David Tedeschi as the editor. No one is given credit for writing the script. On the money side, the film’s release is prominently sponsored by the iPod creationists of Apple Computer, eagerly seeking to become the earphone conduit to everyone’s musical consumption. The executive producer lineup includes Paul G. Allen, the other person who made an enormous fortune from Microsoft Corporation. Allen’s personal interests include enshrining Jimi Hendrix, creating the Experience Music Project – the museum in Seattle that displays his collection of famous guitars – and most recently bankrolling private space travel while morphing the extra space in his Frank Gehry building into The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. This frame does not intrude into the picture itself. The documentary sucks you in again and again with wonderful leaps from historical footage to concerts, surprising monologues confronting television broadcasts. Scorsese’s direction resulted in a documentary with a wonderful momentum and edgy style. It’s success has spawned the appearance of more video evidence. In 2007, Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 2007 appeared, to fill in the pieces that did not make the Scorcese cut of Dylan performing in Newport in the early 1960s. A second DVD release of Pennebacker’s Don’t Look Back now includes concert footage omitted from the original film. Recordings and films of Bob Dylan’s performance in the 1960s is more available now than it was forty years ago.

Murray Lerner, The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965, Sony, 2007 D.A. Pennebaker, Bob Dylan - Don’t Look Back (1965 Tour Deluxe Edition), New Video Group, 2007

2. …Sifting The Evidence… Christopher Rick’s Dylan’s Vision of Sin is made up primarily of long discursive essays about individual songs. He tends to focus on the way Dylan uses words – rhyme, rhythm, allusion – with frequent descents into the enormous etymological well of the Oxford English Dictionary, and often enough this is informative. He goes on for several pages about the phrase “Times change”. Times change The times change The times are changin’ The times are a-changin’ The times they are a-changin’ For the times they are a-changin’

To which he adds, “The acorn has grown into a royal oak” (260). When the song was popular I can’t recall anyone asking why Dylan used this odd archaic sounding language. Why does the clipped ending of chan-

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James Ellison, Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, Da Capo Press, 2004. Jonathan Cott , Bob Dylan the Essential Interviews, Wenner 2006.

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gin’ seem more authoritative than the full pronunciation of the word? Why add another vowel before it? Why add this pronoun? If you think about it too long, it sounds like some immigrant who thinks in his mother tongue and puts the thought into English – “For the dinner, she’s a-ready”. The major value of Ricks’ book lies not in his erudite thesis of medieval sins and virtues. This thesis is used primarily to structure his own language play built upon Dylan’s lyrics. The great value is in his second chapter, “Songs, Poems, Rhymes”. He does an illuminating job of covering the value of rhyme – a topic all but absent in most discussions of American poetry – and he does it from a completely Brit Lit point of view. So the continuum of John Milton, John Keats, Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins with the writing of Dylan is something he can acknowledge rather than construct. He simply finds it in the language. He does not have to provide a trail of influence, though he does his best to cull what he can from Dylan’s interviews. The interview published in newspapers and magazines, transcribed from radio or television, had been the only text to refer to outside the song lyrics before the Year of Bob Dylan began in earnest. Professor Ricks must have had to rely on his own collection of copies and clippings. The bound collections followed his work, if not his thesis – Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan edited by James Ellison in the same year (but too late to be cited by Ricks), followed by Bob Dylan the Essential Interviews edited by Jonathan Cott in 2006. The only thing I remember about the interviews when they were happening early in Dylan’s career was his answer to the question “can you tell me what the song ‘Desolation Row’ is about?” To which Dylan replied “About fifteen minutes.” I am quoting that from memory and might have it wrong. The evasion seemed masterful at the time, and belongs to another subject, his ability to play with people’s expectations. I don’t recall anyone asking him about rhyme. Ricks manages to point out that Dylan mastered the art of writing songs and songs are made from words organized into patterns held together by rhythm and rhymes. Rhymed poetry had disappeared from serious American verse by the beginning of the Modern. Whitman had left it, Dickinson had dispersed it, and both were appreciated as precursors, prophets of what was to come. Ezra Pound dismissed Amy Lowell for using it. Modern masters from W.C. Williams to Charles Olson and Robert Creeley had explored a different way of making verse – tuned to an irregular music, one part rhetoric and one part speech. Pound found music in Provencal, Williams in American speech, Olson in

Hesiod and Creeley in pure tension. Allen Ginsberg began with the same retro-rhyme his father, Louis Ginsberg, had used and then fused biblical and jazz rhythms into a music of emotional thought rhetoric, an imitation of spontaneous language, what you thought your thoughts might sound like if you could hear them. All these techniques were different from the music of songs. Ricks largely ignores the possibility that Dylan learned how to master song writing from the not-at-all literary oral traditions of America. Because of this, his book is not particularly accurate but he is refreshing. His readings provide a means to appreciate the subtlety of how Dylan uses internal rhyme, the surprising juxtaposition of end rhymes, in combination with bursts of syllables to stretch or shrink a line within a repeating form. His essay on “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” (1964) displays most of his own virtues and vices. This song-poem he classifies under the virtue of Temperance. He tells us that W.H. Auden once said there were two kinds of poems: the ones whose titles you could guess and the ones whose title was a surprise. This is one of those songs whose title could not be guessed by reciting the lyrics. My love she speaks like silence, Without ideals or violence, She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire. People carry roses, Make promises by the hours, My love she laughs like the flowers, Valentines can’t buy her.

The opening rhyme is a strong one, and the listener starts off with a quiet shock of contradictions. While silence and violence are a complete rhyme, their meaning offers a remarkable juxtaposition. Ricks finds echoes in a gently rocking verse by William Blake (Silently, invisibly) and a couplet in Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre. In the dime stores and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw conclusions on the wall. Some speak of the future, My love she speaks softly, She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all.

He notes an important part of Dylan’s technique, visible in the way clear end-rhymes are marked in bold above, along with an irregular use of front alliteration rhyme marked in italic. We have one case (future, failure) which combines

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both techniques. An unrhymed end word (softly) stands out in the patterns woven by the verse. He notes the way the poet carefully defines “my love” in negative terms, by what she does not do or is not, and he finds echoes in the drama of Cordelia unable to speak about the love she has for her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear. He quotes from the Book of Daniel to recount the narrative which is source to the common phrase “the writing on the wall” and points out this Biblical allusion in the uncommon “draw conclusions on the wall”. The cloak and dagger dangles, Madams light the candles. In ceremonies of the horsemen, Even the pawn must hold a grudge. Statues made of match sticks, Crumble into one another, My love winks, she does not bother, She knows too much to argue or to judge. The bridge at midnight trembles, The country doctor rambles, Bankers’ nieces seek perfection, Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring. The wind howls like a hammer, The night blows cold and rainy, My love she’s like some raven At my window with a broken wing.

The puzzling and seductive logic of the verses seem to rapidly move from one frame of reference to another. But Ricks stays fixed on the Book of Daniel and uses it to add a conjectured double meaning to the “wise men” allusion. The gifts that wise men bring would first bring to mind the Three Magi. So wealthy children (banker’s nieces) expecting to be treated like the baby Jesus carries a certain feeling of profane materialism. But in Daniel the wise men are the false prophets of the Babylonian king, unable to read the Hebrew letters on the wall. Yet when it comes to resolving the powerful unrhymed “hammer” and the closing image of the raven, his certainty dissolves. This is another of the occasions in my experience of Dylan […] when I don’t know what to think, or what to feel, or quite how to argue and to judge. For there is at the end of the song what feels like a curious rounding on the woman. She has been evoked throughout the song in a way that is on the face of it incompatible with her being like a raven with a broken wing. Why is she like some raven with a broken wing? Because she has now been hit by a hammer? (300)

At which point Ricks slips from wings of a raven to Henry James and Wings of the Dove. Now, when I think about the Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

wind howling like a hammer, I can hear hammering rain and raining blows and echoes of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had A Hammer” hammering out justice. And for any American who had to read Edgar Allan Poe through years of English classes, there is only one raven at a window. Dylan lived in Poe’s old neighborhood, literally if not figuratively. And literally, if not metaphorically, the raven is a very impressive North American bird, a dark giant you might encounter in the woods or on a deserted highway, the trickster of the Pacific Northwest. A raven is black, as in raven hair. But no matter what you hear or think, you are always left with a raven – not an eagle or an angel – with a broken wing. It also happens to be the only time Dylan ever used the word raven in a song. And that’s how the movie ends. There is no real value in trying to correct Ricks’ selection of associations. There is real value in letting his technique open up your mind and see how the machinery of a Dylan song works. I can describe one verse of one song – “Tangled Up In Blue” (1973) – the one that came to mind when I began this essay, using this Ricksian appreciation of rhythm and rhyme. Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’, I was layin’ in bed Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all If her hair was still red. Her folks they said our lives together Sure was gonna be rough They never did like Mama’s homemade dress Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough. And I was standin’ on the side of the road Rain fallin’ on my shoes Heading out for the East Coast Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through, Tangled up in blue

Without understanding who is speaking, where the speaker is, or what he is doing, the rhymes communicate a metastructure, a high-level shape offered to memory and apprehension. Mornin’ is shinin’, something is red. Its rough and something’s not enough. These shoes have paid dues to get through in blue. The listener (or the memorist or singer trying to re-create the song) hears the internal and end rhymes first. Then, the rhymes are pushed and pulled by the elastic rhythms. The third lines have the same four-stress rhythm packed into or pulled from a range of syllables. The first of the third-line structures is compressed by reducing three syllables (won-der-ing) to two (won-drin) and by slurring

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two words into a single stress (if-she). The second is elongated by stressing a two syllable word (Ma-ma’s) followed by a two syllable unstressed word (home-made). The third is tightened even further with single syllables for each stress and nothing between East and Coast. This technique had been mastered ten years before. Look how the tuneless rhythms of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1964) are intricately pieced together: Johnny’s in the basement Mixing up the medicine I’m on the pavement Thinking about the government The man in the trench coat Badge out, laid off Says he’s got a bad cough Wants to get it paid off

This is LANGUAGE poetry. Basement=pavement=government; laid off=bad cough=paid off. The words are the thing itself. They take up the space, they bounce, they grow from some mysterious activity. At the same time, it is a syncopated 4-4 waltz rhythm: 1-3-4, 2-3-4. Then, without a breath of warning, in comes a refrain you haven’t even heard yet: Look out kid It’s somethin’ you did

And the 4-4 LANGUAGE waltz continues, this time with a new rhythm of end rhymes: 1-2-4, 2-4. God knows when But you’re doin’ it again You better duck down the alley way Lookin’ for a new friend The man in the coon-skin cap In the big pen Wants eleven dollar bills You only got ten

Where Ricks excels at riffing on the literary dimensions of verse, Griel Marcus has a true gift for describing music with words. He does his best to generate flashes of insight by mixing the waters of American history and the oils of popular culture. He reminds us that before the success of “Like A Rolling Stone” no one in show business would have imagined an audience listening to a pop song that went on for more than six minutes. I had the pleasure to listen to Marcus read a selection from the book, his description of Michael Bloomfield’s guitar playing. Marcus’ prose conveys the sharp, speeding energy Bloomfield brought to the moment captured Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

in the recording. But ultimately he is not able to reveal any new dimension of the song/recording itself. It was a turning point in a never-ending series of turning points, neither the high point nor the low point of a literary and musical career that has insinuated itself into so many corners of so many rooms that events in this particular recording studio do not stand out against the sky for very long. Perhaps it is a testimony to Dylan’s own sense of taste that the longer piece of writing the song lyrics were drawn from has not been published in a manner similar to Eliot’s pre-edited “Waste Land”, Ginsberg’s typescript of “Howl”, or Rimbaud’s unaltered notebooks. But Marcus had already made the greatest contribution to the Year of Bob Dylan almost ten years before it began. Dylan’s withdrawal from performance in 1966 generated a curious form of intellectual larceny, the bootleg recordings. His audience began to publish and circulate unauthorized copies of anything they could get their hands on. If he wouldn’t sell it to the love-hate audience, they knew how to steal it. His desire and ability to repel and attract his audience was another dimension of his art. The most compelling of these unauthorized recordings was known as The Basement Tapes. In 1997, Marcus published Invisible Republic, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (later retitled The Old Weird America), a remarkable blend of music criticism and social history. The subject was the time (then thirty years before) when Dylan had recorded a group of songs in a basement studio, away from the commercial music business, for purposes that must have included recreation, therapy, and selling them to other groups to record. The book was about the secret history of the musical sources Dylan built on, the recording of various styles of popular ethnic music in the 1930s, and the transmission of that music to a new generation. The vehicle of that transmission had been a set of LP recordings, published in New York in the 1950s, themselves culled from discarded commercial 78 recordings found in second-hand record stores. The year Invisible Republic appeared, Smithsonian Folkways re-released, now as a set of six CDs, The Anthology of American Folk Music edited by Harry Smith containing this major source for Dylan and the musicians he had come of age with in New York. Harry Smith’s role as a counter-folklorist was handsomely and profoundly revealed, further enhanced by thoughtful essays published with the new Smithsonian package. Marcus’ book created an audience for the music, and the music helped explain the book. A few years before this (1992-93), Dylan produced two excellent collections of folk songs, ending what

Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Owl Books/ Henry Holt & Co., 1997

Various Artists, Anthology of American Folk Music (Edited by Harry Smith), Smithsonian Folkways, 1997

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I will judgmentally call the weakest period of his musical career. He demonstrated that he was really good at singing songs from the late 19th and early 20th century. He could convincingly sing the songs of Stephen Foster, Mississippi John Hurt, and Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps that re-emergence of Bob Dylan in the persona of a folk singer, inspired Marcus to investigate. I have no special knowledge of why these things happened. Don’t let my sentences fool you into thinking that any one of these events caused the other. 3. … Seen From Where We Are Now … What Dylan did in the 1960s was to use American folk music – which includes story ballads, talking monologues, country music, rhythm & blues, popular songs transmitted on vinyl and radio – as a vehicle for profound poetry. That seems obvious enough now, but what is not so obvious is why this was so radical, and why we should continue to think it was profound then or is profound today. At the time he began his work, songs were thought of as culture only by folklorists, musicologists, and anthropologists – and anthropologists who sought the meaning of human interaction did not study Euro-American culture. Franz Boas and his disciples, who did such a remarkable job recording Native American language, story and song, did not study the people who were displacing them. There was nobody to study as there was nothing to be lost. Nobody wrote folk music. Folk music was created by Anonymous Tradition. Poetry was made by individual poets. At the height of his 1960s career, at a time when one did not need a magnifying glass to read the text used to package recordings, Bob Dylan published poetry and prose on his album covers, but this form of writing did not have a great impact. What had enormous impact was his ability to channel the language and rhythms and narrative strategies of all forms of American music into poetic psychodramas. Like any dramatic form, these songs happened in the space between the performer and the audience. The achievement was made of many parts: what the performer said, how he said it, how he charmed and challenged the audience’s ability to understand what he was saying. The audience he played to began as college students in the Midwest and evolved into tourists and urban voyeurs in New York’s Greenwich Village. What Dylan was singing was remote and mysterious to all of them, yet he rapidly seduced them into feeling they were listening to a hidden part of themselves, their own hopes, conscience and fears. The connection between the song subjects and the audience was illusive. Why would anyone who had grown up in urban post-war America care about a Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

lonesome train whistle (did trains make people lonesome)? A lover sailing across the sea (sounded romantic)? The sound of a workman’s hammer (sounded biblical)? A boxer from Cuba (sounded frightening)? A woman who took out the garbage (had we seen her)? The illusive romance of these images was inextricable woven into an image of the performer, a boyman, representing the present incarnation of the unexperienced – and so unremembered and mysterious – past. That might have been enough, but for reasons of his own, reasons Bob Dylan doesn’t feel shy about describing today, he felt compelled to shock this same audience out of their reverie. As the success of the illusion closed around him, he quickly added another dimension to his art – the ability to change his image each time the audience developed an image of who he was. In a few short years, his audience convinced itself that he was many things: a folk singer from the Midwest, a poet of the Civil Rights movement, a prophet of the American generation born after the Second World War. In retrospect, it is not clear who convinced who – we can now see that he was capable of playing all of these roles when it suited his temperament and art form. Bob Dylan was and is a song writer, an art form that is poorly understood. We think we understand what a playwright does: write plays that groups of people can perform for groups of people who suspend their disbelief to enjoy the play. There is a passage at the end of Chronicles where Dylan describes watching the audience during the performance of Brecht/Weill songs at the Theater de Lys in the West Village. He was at the theater to meet his girlfriend, not to see the play, but nonetheless he was seeing how Lottie Lenya’s performance of Marc Blitzstein’s English translation of Brecht’s Pirate Jenny drew everyone in and then left them squirming in their seats. [Brecht’s songs] were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated. […] Later, I found myself taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible but you didn’t notice it too much. (273, 275)

It is a wonderful moment of revelation. Brecht wrote plays, but it was the songs that survived the plays being performed. Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong could entertain audiences with Mack The Knife and no one had to see the Three Penny Opera or ponder the political implications of the lyrics. And while they were entertaining, the songs were disturbing. The Bob Dylan who had learned how to make people listen to songs but not yet learned how to write them saw this. He knew that he wanted to do that.

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You could almost say he wanted to learn how to make his audience feel uncomfortable, but that would focus on the means rather than the end. He wanted to make his audience notice that they were wrong, that they didn’t know what to think, that a song could entirely undermine their pre-conceptions about who they were, how they felt, and what they wanted to do next. These people in the audience didn’t know who he was, and he was going to show them that they didn’t even know what that meant. When Bob Dylan rose to fame, his audience didn’t have to know why railroad men drink up your blood like wine to feel what his song wanted them to feel. They were happy to think that whatever railroad men were, they must be a metaphor for something dangerous, just as a mojo was a metaphor for something sexy. In the Folk Scene at the time there were hundreds of people who were singing these songs with coded messages created by working-class English-speaking people in America during various periods, and no one knew where they came from or what they really meant. We had collectively forgotten all our history in part because it wasn’t actually ours. A majority of the US population in the 1950s came from families that had not been in America before the Civil War. No one was teaching the social history of the last 100 years. We learned the story of the American Revolution in school, saw an idealized Wild West on TV every night, and all the movies were about World War II. I learned Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick A Bale of Cotton in Roosevelt Elementary School in New Rochelle, New York. No one in the school had ever seen a cotton plant or knew what a bale was or had the slightest idea what it felt like to pick one up. And a few years later, Jimi Hendrix could perform All Along The Watchtower (1968) and no one had to know the Book of Isaiah or hear the formal structure of an Appalachian ballad or have read Allen Ginsberg to be impressed. Isaiah, 21:6-10, Masoretic Text: For thus hath the Lord said unto me: Go, set a watchman; Let him declare what he seeth! And when he seeth a troop, horsemen by pairs, A troop of asses, a troop of camels, He shall hearken diligently with much heed. And he cried as a lion: ‘Upon the watch-tower, O Lord, I stand continually in the day-time, And I am set in my ward all the nights.’ And, behold, there came a troop of men, horsemen by pairs. And he spoke and said: ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon;

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And all the graven images of her gods are broken unto the ground.’ O thou my threshing, and the winnowing of my floor, That which I have heard from the Lord of hosts, The God of Israel, have I declared unto you.

Allen Ginsberg, “Holy Ghost On The Nod Over The Body Of Bliss”, Planet News, 1968: Is this the God of Gods, the one I heard about in memorized language Universities murmur? Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance exchanges itself freely through all the world’s poetry money, past and future currencies issued & redeemed by the identical bank, electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed on every one of 90 billion dollarbills vibrating to the pyramid-top in the United State of Heaven –

Dylan, 1968: “There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief, “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”

Allen Ginsberg, Planet News, City Lights, 1968.

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke, “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” All along the watchtower, princes kept the view While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

By the time the same audience was presented with symbolic characters whose names echoed numerous folk lyrics – “you say that I’m an outlaw and you say that I’m a thief” (Woody Guthrie) – they were accustomed to not knowing with their conscious mind what was going on in this or any other story.

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Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Columbia Records (LP), 1961

Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

Everyone in urban-suburban and many parts of rural America was experiencing the fact that an enormous infrastructure had been built for diffusing popular music. This same engine was not pushing out poetry. Record companies, radio stations, television programs, cinema – all these businesses were pushing out music. The music store had instruments lining the walls, bins of LPs with listening booths for playing them, racks of current 45s, and piles of Top 40 hit lists distributed each week by the local radio station. There was a radio in every car. There was a television in every house – and in the prosperous households of 1960s suburbia a television in every room – movie theaters in every town, and concerts at every college campus. This was where we received our culture, mediated by the weekly magazines that fell through the front door mail slot, the images we emulated and imagined from. This infrastructure was run by Disney and CBS and NBC and RCA and Columbia Records and Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox and Time Magazine. It may have been 1961 when Dylan arrived in New York, but it was still the conformist 1950s – decades always last about five years into the next one. So after “studying” folk music in Minneapolis and Greenwich Village for two years, Bob Dylan figured out how to write songs made from this mysterious language that everyone was singing. He channeled Robert Johnson (who had channeled Son House) and Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams and Dave Van Ronk (who with a dry and sophisticated wit was already channeling a dozen other singers) and Charlie Chaplin. He read the rhyme and music of Edgar Allen Poe and Enid Starkie’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud. He started changing the words, writing different words with similar phrases to similar tunes, changing the stories to relate to things that were happening at the time, a technique Woodrow Wilson Guthrie had already refined into a popular art. In the same stream of consciousness that fingers Brecht’s dramatic art, the memorist of Chronicles describes the impact of receiving a vinyl pre-release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers during a visit with John Hammond at Columbia Records. Dylan describes playing it for Van Ronk, whose musically educated ear heard the imitation of the earlier blues singers – Johnson’s recordings were made in 1936-37, late in the period that defined Delta Blues. But Dylan, a young man without a sense of linear time, an ear attuned more to intensity than originality, hears something quite different and feels “like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet.” He hears a synthesis, a mastery of language and delivery, a driving force.

I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction – themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts, but I was going to acquire them. I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience could have been. It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. (285)

These songs didn’t seem to be aimed at another culture, the farm-hand children and grandchildren of slaves. They seemed to be aimed at him. The lyrics were apocalyptic, cryptic, fluid. Robert Johnson: If I had possession over judgment day If I had possession over judgment day Lord, the little woman I’m lovin’ wouldn’t have no right to pray … I have a bird to whistle I have a bird to sing Have a bird to whistle and I have a bird to sing I have a woman that I’m lovin boy, but she don’t mean a thing

Dylan: I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings. I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings. But I ain’ a-got Corrina, Life don’t mean a thing.

Child Ballad #12 (Lord Randall): “O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha you been, my handsome young man?” “I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.” “An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son? And wha met ye there, my handsome young man?” “O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie down.” “And what did she give you, Lord Randal, My son? And wha did she give you, my handsome young man?” “Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fein wad lie down.”

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Dylan: Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one? I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains, I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways, I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans, I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard, And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

In this little Greenwich Village world, maybe 100 people who all knew one another, Dylan pulled off an original leap of literary form. In a culture steeped in nostalgia for a world that was gone before most of the performers were born, he began to produce new material that sounded old (=authentic, since everything new was false and commercial), was about a psychological now (when everyone was singing about remote mining disasters, ancient murders, blues complaining about a place no one had ever been), and everyone could listen to and relate to it. More importantly, most of the audience could sing it, memorize it, internalize it. He was shy at first, slipping only one of his own songs onto his first recording, but he sensed he was producing songs that everyone wanted to sing. Bob Dylan, the memorist, gives a long account of why he did this. The way he remembers it, he wasn’t inspired or elected – he was driven to it, forced to change his plan to be a folk singer by an evening of listening to Mike Seeger play at a private party. Mike was skin-stinging. He was tense, poker-faced and radiated telepathy, wore a snowy white shirt and silver sleeve bands. He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had the idioms mastered – Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel – being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. … The thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought. Up ‘til then, I’d gone some places and thought I knew my way around. And then it struck me that I’d never been there before. You open a door to a dark room and you think you know what’s there, where everything is arranged, but you really don’t know until you step inside. (70-72)

This kid who had evaded his family place and business, pretended to be an orphan, escaped from college, eluded any recognizable form of the heritage others might construct around Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

him, opened a door into a house of mirrors where no one could tell where anything was coming from. Dylan was not alone in what he was doing, but in retrospect he seems to have been alone in his sense of purpose. He set out to harness the mystery of an art form that others were imitating. He was so much better at writing these songs once he started that he was quickly in a class by himself. In one year he went from singing for free to recording for Columbia Records, promoted by television appearances, concerts and the echo of others singing his songs. In a few more years, he was the sought-after performer and favorite song writer of an enormous audience. In No Direction Home, Allen Ginsberg recalls going with Dylan to a concert date in Chicago in 1964 and witnessing the intensity and control of his performance. If Ginsberg had not recorded this beautiful description, it would be one of those “you had to be there” things. In a short time, the audience he drew had gotten over the shock of his style and delivery. John Cohen, who is consistently generous and insightful in everything he says in No Direction Home, describes a producer at Vanguard Records rejecting Dylan for being “too visceral”. He was not smooth or melodic at a time when popular folk singers (Joan Baez, Peter-Paul-and-Mary, Judy Collins, Josh White) were both. This voice he created with its harsh twang was less a lack of vocal talent than a reminder of a sound and sensation that we were supposed to forget. His syncopated way of delivering the words was to become an original technique for driving meaning into syllables and bending the language of the songs. The language he had learned to deliver this way combined archaic English phrasing and refrains, Biblical references, blues couplets, surrounded by spontaneous bop prosody emanating from Beat poetry. The combination was disarming in its surrealism. Dylan (circa 1962): I can’t see my reflection in the waters, I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain, I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps, Or can’t remember the sound of my own name. Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’, Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’, Only if she was lyin’ by me, Then I’d lie in my bed once again.

My own true love coexists with the sounds that show no pain. The same voice that can sing about her heart a-softly poundin’ can shift to the mental state where he can’t remember the sound of my own name. Dylan (circa 1965): You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.

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Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, Crying like a fire in the sun. Look out the saints are comin’ through And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

The saints are comin’ through the audience’s head without the slightest understanding of what saints are or why they should be marching or why a marching band in New Orleans – that most exotic mix of European, African, Caribbean and American cultures – might play such a song at a funeral. But the snare-drum rim-shots of syllables make the internal and end-rhymes of the previous couplet unforgettable, not only for the imagery but for the way the imagery both hangs from and creates the music. YONder stands your ORphan with his GUN CRYing like a FIre in the SUN

And then you have internalized it yourself, long before you can even think about the image. What kind of intensity is communicated by this cry? He was a folk singer who was singing only his own material, which was being written so fast, as Wilentz points out, that if you were familiar with his concerts and recordings, each new performance was always made up of things you had heard before and things you had never heard. In his notes for Bob Dylan Live 1964, Wilentz describe that strange sensation the audience felt when they first heard these verses. The call and response happened not at the Amen Bench of the concert church but in the dim spaces of the individual’s mind as he or she wandered back to sleep in their private bedroom. Dylan (“Gates of Eden” introduced as “A lullaby in D minor”, 1964): Of war and peace the truth just twists Its curfew gull just glides Upon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides With his candle lit into the sun Though its glow is waxed in black All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden

The Audience (Wilentz): Two hours later, we would leave the premises and head back underground to the IRT, exhilarated, entertained, and ratified, but also confused about the snatches of lines we’d gleaned from the strange new songs. What was that weird lullaby in D minor? What in God’s name is a perfumed gull (or did he sing “curfewed gal”)?

Dylan had become, as Ginsberg puts it, one column of breath, his whole body delivering these words that were mesmerizing to listen to coming from this strange foreign voice. This performance art was completely authentic to the audience. Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

Few people knew what he was imitating, had even heard the music he was translating and transforming into songs unlike anything they had heard coming from that infrastructure, relentlessly flipping channels on the television, pushing buttons on the car radio, seeping from elevators. Returning now to the concert that Wilentz describes hearing at age 13, we can hear the performance artist, who is as he reassures his audience “wearing my Bob Dylan mask”, carefully modulate and interweave the familiar with the unnerving, simultaneously basking in his popularity. Then there is the moment of rupture when his performance crossed a line. John Cohen, again in No Direction Home, gives his own marvelous reaction to that first shocking moment when Dylan, perhaps naively, threw his blossoming rhythm and blues synthesis in the face of the Newport Folk Festival audience in 1965. As Dylan and the electrified band launch into “Maggie’s Farm”, Cohen recognizes the echo of a song on the Harry Smith anthology, “Down on Penny’s Farm”. He remembers thinking that Dylan had brought it “up to date”. The Bently Boys (1929): Go into the fields And you work all day Deep into the night But you get no pay Promise you some meat Or a little bucket of lard It’s hard to make a living On Penny’s farm It’s a hard time in the country Down on Penny’s farm

Dylan (1965): I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. Well, I wake in the morning, Fold my hands and pray for rain. I got a head full of ideas That are drivin’ me insane. It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

That little transformation, from ancient fiddle and stomp to Michael Bloomfield’s electric guitar slashing across tender ears and vibrating the bones above their hearts, turned out to be the most disturbing performance many people in the audience had ever seen. The audience didn’t get upset because Dylan had taken a sharecropper’s protest against a landlord and turned it into a metaphysical protest against being expected to follow other people’s goals. They were

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upset because he wasn’t acting the way they, the audience, expected him to act. The Newport Folk Festival audience, people focused enough on folk music to get themselves to a Rhode Island resort town from wherever else they were spending their summer, was there to hear Dylan because their minds and ears had been opened by two important keys. They had heard his songs sweetly interpreted by Peter Paul and Mary (the apparently authentic folk trio created by the man who was also Dylan’s manager), so the cornerstone songs that promised prophecy and appealed to conscience – “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “The Times They Are a-Changin’” – were already familiar. This whining singer had been introduced to unsuspecting thousands by Joan Baez, a woman who’s melodic powers had charmed everyone. These two acts – and they were both major actors, molding the expectations of their considerable audiences with their appearance, their choice of songs, their choice of political causes – opened the door for Dylan’s art, willingly, with great conviction, and with their own high expectations. In the summer of 1962 at the YMCA auditorium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts I heard this voice coming from a scruffy kid dressed in farm-hand overalls at what I thought was a Joan Baez concert – that was the experience the audience had paid for – and I thought he sounded horrible. I was one month shy of my own thirteenth birthday, two years before Professor Wilentz experienced his. When I recognized that this kid was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in that whiny voice – a song that was played on Top 10 radio that summer by Peter Paul and Mary – I distinctly remember leaning over to the person sitting next to me and saying “If the person who wrote that song hears him singing it like that, he’ll kill him.” But before Baez returned to save the evening, I also remember being drawn in and intrigued by a song that seemed to be about the murder of Black Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, yet it seemed to say something sympathetic about the White people who killed him. That was a complex thought for an almost thirteen-year-old mind to catch, but Dylan communicated it. You didn’t have to understand him or like him to find him intriguing. Today it is wonderfully ironic to see Peter Yarrow (whose family also arrived in America from the same faraway Ukraine as Dylan’s grandmother) nervously introduce Dylan’s line-crossing performance in Newport in No Direction Home. The wonder boy who gave his contemporaries such good material had certainly succeeded in putting them in an uncomfortable situation.

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Dylan’s audience was very big by then, and for all the people who hated what he was doing because it crossed their evil-commercialism line, there were also many who learned to love hearing this synthesis coming through the broad channel of popular music and didn’t know or care about the line at all. The animosity is captured on a recording that was circulating in the early 1970s as a bootleg album and in 1998 had become The Bootleg Series Vol. 4, Bob Dylan Live 1966. Here we have the audio record of the love-hate tug of war that went on between the artist and the audience, as he delivered musical messages in Manchester England to people who thought they knew the difference between folk music and pop music. In No Direction Home we see more of this fight between transmitters and receptors in footage that Pennebaker shot for a film Dylan decided not to release. The Complainers are easier to capture on film, and louder, than the Bewildered and Content. And the artist who set out to make his audience uncomfortable seems engaged in a dialog with that part of the audience trying to make him uncomfortable back. “Play it fucking loud” Dylan famously instructs his group before starting into “Like A Rolling Stone”, as if the intensity of the sound and the blinking of his eyes would hold back the conflict he’d created. And, in a way, he was right. Not that playing it louder would resolve the conflict but that blinking his eyes, he could make it change direction. No Direction Home makes another contribution to this vision of a man in love with his own word power. We watch a sequence of Bob Dylan gazing at the signs on a pet shop somewhere in England. He reads the language on the signs:

Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall Concert”, notes by Tony Glover, Columbia Legacy (CD), 1998

We will collect clip bath & return your dog KN1 7727 cigarettes and tobacco Animals & birds bought – or – sold on commission

Then he begins to re-arrange it into rhythmic and increasingly surreal assertions. He is blasting the cameraman,

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faster and funnier each time the film starts rolling. I’m lookin’ for a place that’s gonna animal my soul knit my return bathe my foot and collect my dog [cut] commission me to sell my animals to bird my clip and buy my bath and return me back to the cigarettes

Then the scene cuts to a London concert in 1966 during the final months of his year of touring. By 1966, he could make songs out of anything. This level of formal sophistication had been achieved in about four years of study, analysis, and performance. There were chord changes, tunes, and musical arrangements behind it all. But like the larger theatricality they established, the music survives only in memory, if you’ve heard it, and most certainly when you’ve heard it over and over and over again – this repetition is the very nature of popular music – and only portions of it survive when it is all reduced to the words on the page. But if it had not been written, banged out on a typewriter, carefully prepared and memorized, it would not have been performed. 4. …In the Hall of Mirrors Chronicles is the memoir of an elusive man. Its author directs a great deal of wit and bile towards the people who criticized him for not being the public persona they wanted him to be. Then he devotes just as much care to guarding what he’s defined as his private life from view. The entire narrative is very precise in the way the memorist does not describe his family or his religious background or beliefs. He recalls the names and appearance of many people he knew in Minnesota and New York in the years leading up to 1965, and he has a way of sketching each one with an emotional aura and physical details. But all the members of his own family are unmentioned or, if mentioned, invisible. A daughter-in-law is cooking something good for dinner, but only the scent of her cooking is described. A wife accompanies him on a motorcycle ride into the Louisiana countryside, and the only glimpse we catch of her in the prose is when she puts down her John Le Carré novel to apply some eye shadow, signaling that it is time to leave the country store where they stopped. His reminiscences of childhood includes advice from a one-legged Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

pipe-smoking grandmother who had “come to America from Odessa”, and this is the only suggestion of an ethnic background beyond the recollection of growing up in the Iron Range region of northern Minnesota. We have an entire chapter devoted to how our hero set out to destroy his audience’s fixation with the image that brought him fame. Like the description of how he was forced to become a songwriter, the purpose of this campaign is clear: “Liberty for myself and my loved ones had to be secured.” I went to Jerusalem, got myself photographed at the Western Wall wearing a skullcap. The image was transmitted worldwide instantly and quickly all the great rags changed me overnight into a Zionist. (122)

This is the only reference to Judaism in the entire book. The only other subject that approaches religious belief is a description of not eating pork, inspired by a sermon he heard on the radio where Malcom X pointed out that pigs are related to rats. Just where that places him on the JudeoChristian-Islamic spectrum seems intentionally ambiguous, as if to say why should there be anyplace to stand. The question everyone wants to ask him is “what do you believe in?” The answer, repeated in the songs many times, appears in a-chronological observations that employ a distinctly Protestant biblical language to cast judgment on a present nostalgic for a past. Dylan’s summation of mankind in the final verse of “Blind Willie McTell” (1983) is my personal favorite. Well, God is in his heaven And we all want what’s his But power and greed and corruptible seed Seem to be all that there is I’m gazing out the window Of the St. James Hotel And I know no one can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell

Supreme beings and the need for justice are one with a reflection of human imperfection (I almost used the unChristian term hopelessness) coupled with the need to resist and draw strength from the past. This free society, or society of free men, is not an open-minded world. Power is in the hands of The Authorities, and no one seems too interested or capable of changing it. That situation continues to the present day, set in the flood plain of the Mississippi delta. “High Water (for Charley Patton)” (2001): Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew “You can’t open your mind, boys To every conceivable point of view.”

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They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five Judge says to the High Sheriff, “I want him dead or alive Either one, I don’t care.” High Water everywhere

Various Artists, Gotta Serve Somebody, The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, Columbia (CD), 2003.

Dylan’s persona began as a boy-prophet preaching to the Protestants. Over forty years he has evolved into a passing stranger quoting Old Testament to the Black Baptists. There is no mention in Chronicles of the period in late 1970s when he outraged and alienated much of his audience by professing evangelical Christianity and performing an entirely new repertoire of original Gospel songs. An interesting preface to The Year of Bob Dylan was the release in 2003 of Gotta Serve Somebody, The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. This anthology collects ten of the songs from that period, performed by gospel singers and ensembles. With Dylan’s persona removed, you can hear just how well he also mastered this particular form of American songwriting. Compared to the ballad, blues or love song, the gospel song presents the songwriter with more limited set of problems to express and resolve. For every problem encountered – fear, insecurity, pride, unworthiness, despair – there is only one Answer. When the subject of material vanity was set as a blues, Memphis Slim described it this way in “Mother Earth” (1950): You may own half a city Even diamonds and pearls You may buy that plane, baby And fly all over this world Don’t care how great you are Don’t care what you worth When it all ends up You gotta go back to Mother Earth

Dylan shifts the argument from material vanity to spirituality, and doubles the line, magnifying the comparisons in each couplet in “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979): You may be a construction worker working on a home, You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome, You might own guns and you might even own tanks, You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You’re gonna have to serve somebody, Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Who else could rhyme tanks and banks? It sounds even more impressive coming out of Shirley Caesar’s mouth. To make it clear that his own involvement in the project is unambiguPaul Kahn | Collected Essays

ous, he finishes the collection of gushing devotional songs with an un-smooth and to my ears very un-gospel-sounding duet with Mavis Staples. For the package he is presented as a photo of the current pencil-thin moustache lonesome gambler. Jean Genet demonstrated in his novels and plays that crime is a conspiracy involving both criminals and police. Each needs the other to prove their existence. Bob Dylan’s art is a similar conspiracy between himself and his audience. He created himself in an image he sensed all around him, yet his audience often felt that only he was able to imagine what this image should be. Few individuals have ever gotten to shape and control their own history this way even once. Dylan has managed to do it repeatedly. That he succeeded at creating a kind of art that did not exist before him is self-evident. Yet as much as his art reaches into the hearts and minds of an audience that dwarfs the readership of most contemporary writers, the meaning of his work remains mysterious. Perhaps what people respond to most is being challenged and surprised by what they think they hear. We could make the same observation about any great art. On November 26, 1965, when Dylan was performing his electric psychodramas at concert halls across America, sometimes to the hushed and awed and sometimes to the hostile, all of them straining to find their own personal meaning in his lyrics, Joseph Beuys was performing a solo action at an art gallery in Dusseldorf, West Germany. The year Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, Beuys was a bomber pilot on the Russian front serving the Masters of War. Twenty-four years later, he was launching a career of art actions and monumental sculptures. For the moment, there were no crowds to cheer or jeer at him. The gallery was closed to the public and Beuys’ actions were witnessed only by the photographer Ute Klophus and a television crew. The title of the piece was “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”

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Beuys sat on a chair in one corner of the gallery, next to the entrance. He had poured honey over his head, to which he had then affixed fifty dollars worth of gold leaf. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, which he looked at steadfastly. Then he stood up, walked around the room holding the dead hare in his arms, and held it up close to the pictures on the walls; he seemed to be talking to it. Sometimes he broke off his tour and, still holding the dead creature, stepped over a withered fir tree that lay in the middle of the gallery. All this was done with indescribable tenderness and great concentration. (135)

Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, Abbeyville Press, 1987.

He seemed to be talking to a dead animal. I carry this picture in my head today, thanks to Klophus’ collaborative art, imagining the language coming from his lips. Like Dylan, Beuys was often confronted by interviewers, both sympathetic and hostile, wanting him to explain the meaning of his work. Unlike Dylan, he was a teacher and an advocate of social action. He was not shy about discussing meaning. Beuys: This seems to have been the action that most captured people’s imaginations. On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or questioning. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. (105)

Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, Thames & Hudson, 1979

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Perhaps Dylan continues to perform a similar kind of action, dressed in various disguises at State Fairs, Minor League Baseball stadiums, and concert halls around America, performing songs that seem to explain some of the world’s mystery. His popularity and impact continues now into a third generation, even as he continues to perform what has become a blend of forty years of material. This fame gives him plenty of space to publish and release more old and new materials. But beneath the current fame, which will disappear as it did before and will again, is the nature and extent of his achievement. Perhaps because he chose songwriting and performance as his primary art form, a medium well below the radar of most intellectual discourse, we have not been able to see how his work is among the great literary achievements of American culture.

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Reading The Book of Marco Polo

Marco Polo has been my companion throughout my life. Along with Robin Hood and King Arthur, he came from a time-space called the Middle Ages, where men wore tights and fought with swords and staffs. A place of ill-defined chronology and geography, the Middle Ages was located after the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and before the discovery of the New World. Marco Polo was neither a noble thief nor a mystical king. He was an adventurer and wanderer who knew how large the world truly was. I was taught that I lived in the New World, a place that had been discovered by people from the Old World. The city where I was born had the name New York because somewhere in the Old World there was a town called York. A statue of Henry Hudson gazing across the river that bore his name. There was a statue of Columbus in the center of Columbus Circle and parades on Columbus Day. In school I learned that Hudson was an Englishman and worked for the Dutch. Columbus was an Italian and worked for the Spanish. These men discovered my America. Marco Polo was from Venice, a place whose canals and bridges were reproduced on the walls of many Italian restaurants. I had a sense that he came from a different part of our past than these other heroes. I first met him in a kind of general store where toys, paper and school supplies were sold, a place to stop between home and school and spend some pocket change. There was candy, gum and soda along with newspapers and magazine. Among the magazines were racks of comic books. The adventures of super heroes were issued every month, each one dressed in tights with lightning emanating from his fist and a grimace of rage wrapped around his face. These narratives were colorful but predictable. Along the back shelf, often buried underneath the current Green Lantern or the Justice League of America, were graphic versions of stories taken from European and American books, the Classic Illustrated comics. The Man in the Iron Mask, The Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo proved to be good comic books. They all took place in a time before atomic bombs and rocket ships. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and people were riding Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

in horse-drawn carriages with feathers sticking out of their hats. The store where I found the comics was close to a luncheonette – The Hamburger Depot. Here a model train carried orders along the wall to each booth equipped with a silver jukebox. The culture that surrounded me in school, television and cinema – Paul Bunyan and Rumplestilskin, Pinocchio and Snow White – was a mélange of American and European folklore. It was much easier to look at the pictures than to process 19th century descriptive prose. I preferred the comics to the books in the library. I read the colorful Classics Illustrated version of The Adventures of Marco Polo sitting in a booth at The Hamburger Depot. In retrospect, this proved to be an excellent introduction to a book that has attracted, repulsed, confounded and puzzled men of great learning for seven centuries. As I flipped the pages, a teenage customer dropped a dime into the jukebox and chose a song by Elvis Presley. I could see immediately that young Marco, who was a teenager when he left Venice, wore tights and a floppy hat. When fighting the Moslems, whose faces were always dark, he rode a white horse. When being introduced to a white-skinned Princess Silver Bells, he knew how to be polite. The skin of Kublai, his king, was a shade of yellow. Kublai had long fingernails, wore an embroidered gown with big sleeves and a tall hat. He ruled the kingdom of Cathay, which was a marvelous place. Before I read the comic, someone at school had pointed out that Kublai Khan shared my family name, and had started calling me Kublai. I had no idea whether to be proud or embarrassed. I had seen King David and King Solomon in illustrated books at Hebrew School, but as far as I could tell Kublai wasn’t Jewish. Marco Polo assured me that Kublai was the most powerful, wise and beneficent king of the East. He was the wise Emperor of China, a place of enormous size and wealth. In the comic he looked Chinese, but he was a Mongol or Moghul (perhaps he lived in the Taj Mahal) or a Manchu (he looked like Fu Manchu). The old king was fond of Marco and his family, but he was getting old. The message of the story was clear. Marco had to leave this paradise and go back to being just another grown-up. When he returned from Cathay to Europe, now a grown man, he was captured in a sea battle and thrown into prison. Gazing at the sky through a small stone window in his cell, he wrote the true story of his adventures, which I held in my hands as the hamburgers went by on the train and Elvis sang about love and dogs. ***

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The Adventures of Marco Polo, Classics Illustrated number 27, Gilberton Company, 1946 (p. 29)

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Marco Poloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book presents a portrait of the world where a traveler can ride for years from one rich and sophisticated city to the next. From the time it was composed, it proved to be so compelling that it was reproduced in multiple manuscripts and translated into a dozen European languages. It was translated and copied so many times with so many variations in the text that it may be impossible to determine what the original version contained. Many details are puzzling but compared to other 700-year-old books it requires little explanation. The theme of the book seems self-evident. Marco Polo went to Asia and came back to single-handedly inject an account of China and the Mongol Empire into the European cultural record. The singularity of his account is an innocent illusion. We cannot find Marco Polo guilty of being unaware that others had or would write their own accounts of the time and place he describes. And the readers who share this illusion are innocent as well, as the other accounts have always been very difficult to find. The most findable are the reports of travels from Eastern Europe to Mongolia known as the Tartar Relations. Two Franciscan monks, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine from Perugia, and William of Rubruck, born in Flanders, each wrote accounts of their separate diplomatic missions to the Mongol capital city of Karakorum in the decades before Marco Polo. Their descriptions of the Mongol beliefs and practices, and of the city that flourished in the Mongol homeland for forty years are the most detailed eye-witness accounts that survive in any language. But both men were writing intelligence reports and their description of the East was limited to the steppe lands between the Black Sea and Mongolia. They did not see Persia, China or India. Two more Italian accounts exist in libraries and are described in books about the period. A generation after Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone, another Franciscan from northern Italy, wrote about his travels through Persia, India, and by sea to Southeast Asia and the cities of China in the early 14th century. A short time after Odorico returned from his travels, NiccolĂ˛ da Conti recorded a description of his decades working in the trading network between India and south China, Persia, Arabia and Egypt. Conti was yet another Venetian merchant who spent most of his life outside of Europe. Nearly impossible to find is The Flower of Histories of the East, a description of Asia dictated by the Armenian Prince Hetoum to his French secretary at the beginning of the 14th century. His Armenian homeland was a part of the Mongol kingdom at the time and his information about the geogra-

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phy and history of Asia was substantially accurate. But like the earlier Franciscans, Hetoum did not travel south to India or east to China. Each author was entirely unaware of his predecessors and few people have read all these accounts. Their manuscripts were copied and circulated during the centuries before printing. But none of them appealed to the broad audience that read or listened to The Book of Marco Polo. The other accounts may be accurate and insightful but they are not very entertaining. Just as printing began, the humanist Giambattista Ramusio edited and translated his collection of Marco Polo manuscripts into a unified Italian book. It is Ramusio who declared the accomplishments of his fellow Venetian to be the greatest the world had ever seen. Once Ramusio’s edition became a printed book, The Book of Marco Polo became the most well-known record of its time. Of all the descriptions of Asia before ocean-crossing ships brought Europeans to every part of the planet, only Marco Polo’s description of the world has been popular from the time it was first written to the present day.

Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, John Larner, Yale University Press, 1999

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*** Many well-known books are not well understood. I was in a bookstore one day, looking for a book to read, and chose the Penguin paperback edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. I thought it was finally time to read the book itself. Once I read it, I became fascinated by the layers of transmission that brought it to my attention. I have become a devotee of Marco Polo’s book, the imagination of the book’s 19th and 20th century illustrators, and the books written about The Book. Of all the recent examples of books about The Book – and there are many recent examples – John Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (1999) is the best. It is the work of a man who reads many languages and constructs arguments by entertaining all sides of a disagreement with taste and candor. He provides the most convincing explanation of where the Venetian and his collaborator came from and the European world that received and popularized their book. Larner explains a wide range of misconceptions about the author and the book. Polo has been called an exaggerator, a liar, a proto-colonialist, a wise man, a complete fabrication, a hero of the Venetian Republic, and a great explorer. The Book has been described as a romance tale, a geography of the world, a record of extraordinary travels, and a manual for fellow merchants hoping to enter the silk and spice trade.

Larner enumerates all these descriptions and then explains how none are entirely correct. After reading Larner’s book, I felt that I finally understood why The Book was written. In the Prologue the writer, Messer Rustichello of Pisa, states that he has written a book from the stories provided to him by Messer Marco Polo of Venice. Both men have the time to create this book because they are prisoners in Genoa. The reader is to understand that the recording of these stories, like the rest of the Polos’ adventures, is an opportunity born from adversity. Rustichello also reports that Marco Polo feels it would be a pity if he did not record his experiences so that others could learn of the world he has seen. Then Rustichello writes about what Marco Polo has seen. His Franco-Italian language is filled with repetitions of clichés. Before becoming a prisoner in Genoa, Rustichello had written the Méliadus, a collection of stories about King Arthur. Larner points out that entire passages from this earlier work reappear word for word in The Book of Marco Polo. One of these plagiarized sections — if copying from your own work can be called plagiarism — is the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai. The language in this passage is identical to Rustichello's description of “the reception of Tristan at the court of Camelot” in his earlier work. Anyone who finds in these sentences proof of how well young Marco was received is mistaking figures of speech for eye-witness account. The reader can see a man standing on a stage before an assembled court, a powerful guild or town council, waving his hand back and forth as he recounts the stories. Each rhetorical “what more can I say?” leads to the next “Let me tell you about these marvels: forms of money used – the quantities of silk produced – number of ships in their harbors – the number of troops stationed at each gate”. And after each enumeration the story continues onward to the next part of the world: “On leaving Kinsai the travelers proceeds southwest for a day’s journey, through a country filled with delightful mansions, villages and gardens” and so on and so on. Once we pass the Prologue, it is difficult to distinguish the writer and the teller. The “we”, “he” or “I” of the voice shifts frequently. Neither the writer nor the teller is what we would now call an ethnographer. Rustichello shapes the stories that he writes, but he rarely comments on them. Marco Polo notices the beliefs and practices around him, but he is not very interested in precisely who believes what. He identify the subjects of the Great Khan by terms that mix religious practices and regionalism: Saracens, idolaters,

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sorcerers, Cathayans, Manzians, Nestorian Christians. If we imagine that all medieval Europeans saw the world in terms of Us and Them, we see that Marco Polo is rather openminded. He recognizes a world filled with many Thems, none of which are exactly like Us, even those who identified themselves as Christians. Despite his reputation, Marco Polo was not an explorer. An explorer sets out of find a previously unknown place. Marco Polo tells us about places that are already known. He reports very little about the journey or journeys that gave him this knowledge. The locations in the story move the reader-listener from place to place, but we rarely have any news of how he traveled or what he did when he visited a specific place. We learn almost nothing about Marco Polo as a person. His description of the world contains no stories of personal conflict, romantic attachments, spiritual confrontations or personal exploits. The few exceptions to this – his claim that he served as governor of a Chinese city; that he, his father and uncle were responsible for creating the war machines for the Mongol victory over an important Chinese fortress – are among the details that are arguably false. The Chinese sources do not mention his name among the governors of the period. Other sources mention foreign engineers building the war machines during the battle he refers to, but these same sources make it clear that the battle occurred at a time before the Polos arrived in Cathay. I imagine these assertions of personal importance as moments in the collaboration when the writer’s desire to impress his audience overcame the teller’s reticence. “Okay,” I hear Marco saying to Rustacello, “ you can say I was governor of that city. Now, let’s get on with it.” The main message of the book is that Marco Polo, his father and his uncle all worked for the court of Kublai Khan, a king who ruled a vast part of the world. The only description of Marco’s job is in the Prologue. It came about that Marco, the son of Messer Niccolò, acquired a remarkable knowledge of the customs of the Tartars and of their language and letters. I assure you for a fact that before he had been very long at the Great Khan’s court he had mastered four languages with their modes of writings. He was wise and far-sighted above the ordinary, and the Great Khan was very well disposed to him because of this exceptional merit and worth that he detected in him. Observing his wisdom, the Khan sent him as his emissary to a country named Kara-jang, which it took him a good six months to reach. The lad fulfilled his mission well and wisely. He Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

had seen and heard more than once, when emissaries whom the Khan had dispatched to various parts of the world returned to him and rendered an account of the mission on which they had been sent but could give no other report of the countries they visited, how their master would call them dolts and dunces, and declare that he would rather hear reports of these strange countries, and of their customs and usages, than the business on which he had sent them. When Marco went on his mission, being well aware of this, he paid close attention to all the novelties and curiosities that came his way, so that he might retail them to the Great Khan. On his return he presented himself before the Khan and first gave a full account of the business on which he had been sent – he had accomplished it very well. Then he went on to recount all the remarkable things he had seen on the way, so well and shrewdly that the Khan, and all those who heard him, were amazed and said to one another: ‘If this youth lives to manhood, he cannot fail to prove himself a man of sound judgment and true worth.’ What more need I say? From this time onwards the young fellow was called Messer Marco Polo; and so he will be called henceforth in this book. And with good reason, for he was a man of experience and discretion. (Latham translation, p.40-41) This story is the key for the rest of the narrative. Our hero tells stories “well and shrewdly” to inform and impress his audience. Whether the anecdote is the truth or not, it is clearly Rustichello’s way of explaining how Marco Polo came to know more of the world than any other man. It is also the framework for building an entertaining description of the world. Unlike the Franciscans who wrote about the Asian world, Marco Polo was neither a missionary nor a spy. The Franciscans that preceded and followed the Polos were Church diplomats. According to the Prologue, the Polo brothers were merchants who became messengers in the other direction, carrying documents from the Mongol court to the Roman Pope. Marco’s own actions represent three Venetian virtues: shrewdness, loyalty to his family and his ability to please his employer, the Great Khan. After considering all the possible roles Marco ascribes to himself in The Book, Larner concludes that he may have been a mid-level government tax collector. Perhaps he was, as stated in the Prologue, neither more nor less than one of Kublai Khan’s favorite messengers, but the way he describes the world implies familiarity with tax records. Larner’s great

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insight is how this minor role makes The Book what it truly is. While both the writer and the teller know this world will appear exotic and fantastic to the European reader, for Marco Polo it is simply the world he lived in. While it contains accounts of marvels or miracles, most of the story is simply a man telling us the way things are. The title of the French 15th century illustrated version that is often reproduced, Le Livre des Merveilles, is deceptive. The Book of Marco Polo can be best understood not as a Book of Marvels but as a Description of the Normal. *** At the beginning of the 13th century, the Mongol tribe unified the steppe peoples of Asia and took military and administrative control of all the agricultural and sedentary cultures touching the steppe. By the end of that century, their power and influence extended from Korea to Syria, from Siberia to Tibet, from China to Persia. This transformation, including their invasion of Europe in 1241-1242, happened before Marco Polo was born. At the time Niccolò Polo presents “my son and your liege man” to Kublai Khan’s court in Cathay, the Mongols ruled a world that was populated by a hundred million subjects. In each conquered region they were foreigners who employed foreigners to rule their "people". This policy reserved the loyalty of their administrators to their masters, the small group – perhaps two million Mongols now spread across East and Central Asia, the Middle East and Russia – who controlled all resources and all assignments. So our young Venetian went to work as a professional foreigner in a world where professional foreigners were a favored class. Marco Polo worked in China. F.W. Mote’s recent history of China explains that the Medieval European social concepts of distinctly urban and rural populations, and class distinctions such as nobles and serfs, do not translate the social order that existed in this Chinese world. In the 13th century, most European cities were semi-independent trade centers and most European farmers worked on land that was owned not by their own clans or tribes but by another noble class. Quite the opposite was true in 13th century China. Cities of all sizes were administered by the central state. Farmers and town dwellers owned their property. The urban, suburban and rural populations of the Chinese states were far more integrated than they were in the European world, and each central state far more accepted as the principle of a shared order.

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Ordinary Chinese people of all occupations were most commonly referred to en masse as liang min, or “the good people,” people who pursued orderly lives and caused no problems to their communities. That term, or simply min (ordinary people), designated village farmers as well as town folk and city dwellers, and they might be of any economic status. Some min households were specifically designated “military,” “artisan,” “salt-field worker,” and the like, but the vast majority were farmers and villagers of whatever economic status. Only men in the individually attained status of guan, meaning “official” (and kin in their immediate households), were not included in the category of min, or “ordinary people”. (F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800, pp. 365-366) This was the Chinese culture the Mongols had conquered. Kublai had declared himself Great Khan in 1260, the same year Marco’s father and uncle began their careers as international traders. Marco Polo left Venice in 1271, at the age of 17, to accompany his father and uncle on their return to Kublai’s court. They returned to Venice 24 years later in 1295. The years when Marco was an official in China was a time when the role of official was given almost exclusively to foreigners, many of whom were recruited from Persia and Central Asia to control the ordinary people of Cathay (the north) and the newly conquered territory of Mangi (the south). In this normal world, any official, even a foreigner from Venice, could travel from city to city, through well-populated suburbs and farmland, and always be given a new horse and a comfortable place to sleep as he went about his business for the Great Khan. If he spoke Mongol, Turkish and Persian he could communicate with the other officials who, like himself, were not Chinese. In his description of China, Marco Polo recounts the names of cities and categorizes them with sets of attributes.

Imperial China 900-1800, Frederick W. Mote, Harvard University Press, 2003

On leaving Changli and proceeding southwards for six days, the traveler passes many cities and towns of great prosperity and splendor, inhabited by idolaters who burn their dead, men subject to the Great Khan, using paper money, living by commerce and industry and enjoying great abundance of all sorts of foodstuffs. (Latham translation, p.195) Marco Polo describes the abundance he passes through in these terms. Being a foreigner, he knew little about the local culture. He had access to stories of recent Mongol conquest,

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tales he may have heard from other officials, but he demonstrates no awareness of the two thousand years of Chinese history. The world he describes is a place where people recognize the authority of the central state and do business as part of the centralized economy. This economy was defined by the acceptance of paper money, an innovation introduced by Kublai which Marco describes in some detail. To further describe the economy, he enumerates the useful products these people produce: silk, rice, cloth, paper, vegetables and fruit. We now understand from Persian, Mongolian and Chinese sources that the steppe people who conquered eastern Asia practiced and accepted a diverse collection of religious beliefs. Shamanism, Daoism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, Tantric (Tibetan) Buddhism, Sunni and Shia Islam were all present in this normal world and accepted by Kublai’s court as valid religions. The audience of The Book knew only two religions, Roman and Eastern Christianity, and one enemy, Islam. Marco Polo observes the other religious beliefs and practices as his description moves through various parts of Central Asia, China and India. The differences among many of these religions escape his notice. He does not recognize the Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist or Hindu statues and iconography he sees in the temples of China and Southeast Asia as different religions. When he describes China he observes the common feature a European could understand: the people of this city worship idols and cremate their dead. In India, outside of this normal world, his attention to details grows significantly. His description of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) includes perhaps the earliest European version of the life of Buddha. It is no worse than Herman Hesse’s popular novel Siddhartha, and much briefer. He also includes an admiring account of the ascetic practices of Hindu sadhus. *** Larner points out that, despite the legend that a copy was available in Venice as a reference book for merchants, The Book is not a practical guide for European traders. One of those great missing details in The Book is any description of Marco Polo’s daily tasks during his decades away from Venice. The practical details of trading are missing, such as what to buy in this city and where to sell it or exchange it for other goods. Instead he describes a world in which the possibilities for profitable trade are to be found everywhere. In his description of the world, trade is carried on by everyone he sees. Rice, spices and silk are moving along the rivers and Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

canals of Cathay. Woven fabrics are moving from India to Persia to Armenia. He reports on the places where precious minerals are plentiful. He tells us where gold is traded for silver at favorable rates, and where silver is exchanged for cowry shells. While he does not focus on the details of trading, he does focus on quantities. Whether he was working as a tax official, a messenger or a trader, he explains the world in terms of numbers. Larner proposes that this is the result of a Venetian, rather than an ecclesiastical or classical, education. Marco's most vivid descriptions are reserved for the three places he is sure will impress his European readers: Kublai’s summer residence of Shangdu, the new capital of Dadu (Beijing) and the newly conquered Song capital of Kinsai (Hangzhou). Whether he spent most of his time in these places is impossible to say. The purpose of these descriptions is not to report on his life. The purpose is to impress his audience with a vision of grandeur far greater than anything in Europe. When the Mongol army took Hangzhou in 1276 it was the largest city on the planet. Population figures are not part of Marco Polo’s vocabulary. He describes the city’s size by invoking enormous numbers, saying the circumference of the city is 100 miles and that it contains 12,000 bridges. This same figure of 12,000 bridges shows up in the Odorico da Pordenone account, which suggests that the Chinese may have used it in the same way Americans describe Minnesota as “the land of a thousand lakes”. The figures that seem like incredible exaggerations may have simply been a way of saying “big”. At the same time, some of the numbers he gives are remarkably precise. Jacques Gernet estimates the population of Hangzhou in 1276 based on Chinese sources as well over one million (Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, p. 28). F.W. Mote points out that the Chinese method of counting households rather than individuals resulted in low estimates of actual population numbers. Without reference to the science of demography, Marco Polo produces an accurate population estimate of the world’s largest city by counting pounds of pepper consumed. I can imagine a discussion between Marco Polo and the writer, Rustichello. Marco announces he will now describe the most enormous city he ever saw. Rustichello translates the Venetian monologue into courtly Franco-Italian. As he comes to the end of his description of a market district filled with more people than he had ever seen in one place, Marco reaches for the notes he saved from his travels. He dictates numbers that Rustichello embeds in the description of how the city operates. It takes the form of a word-problem, the

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kind of narrative arithmetic we all once faced in Elementary school: Let me quote as an illustration the amount of pepper consumed in this city so that from this you may be able to infer the quantities of provisions – meat, wine and groceries – that are required to meet the total consumption. According to the figures ascertained by Messer Marco Polo from an official of the Great Khan’s customs, the pepper consumed daily in the city of Kinsai for its own use amounts to 43 cart-loads, each cart-load consisting of 223 lb. (Latham translation, pp. 216-217) If we solve the arithmetic in his word-problem, we get the following result. Forty-three carts times 223 pounds is 9,589 pounds of pepper. That is 153,424 ounces or 4,349,497 grams in modern measure. If we assume that a citizen of Kinsai consumed 3 grams of pepper each day, the 43 cartloads are feeding 1,449,832 people. ***

The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Ronald E. Latham, Penguin Classics, 1958

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Marco Polo is much better at arithmetic than he is at historical narrative. He does not compare or contrast the grandeur of Kublai Khan’s Cathay with the former grandeur of Imperial Rome or Constantinople. He is an historical illiterate relying entirely on oral tradition. His account of Asian history is limited to the stories that he hears about the places in his normal Asian world. And these stories are further limited by decisions of the writer and teller as to which tales were worth telling. Yet the stories he tells have proven over the centuries to be the starting point for countless European readers to fill in the gaps. The “true” historical narrative is a modern phenomenon. Our current sense of truth includes many things that Marco Polo didn’t care about. When I read The Travels as an adult, I was hoping to learn who the Mongols really were from a man who knew them. The mix of references I had in my head at the time produced a puzzling question. Why did Genghis Khan appear to be “a man of great ability and wisdom” to Marco Polo, and a figure of destruction to others? Marco Polo's audience lived in a world circumscribed by the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. They knew as little about the nomads of Central Asia as they did about any people beyond those shores. Tartaros, the common Latin name for the steppe lands in 13th century Europe, came from

a Greek term for the place in Hades where the Titans were imprisoned, and so he calls the people to the east of Black Sea Tartars. The way Marco describes this region is methodical, entertaining and marvelously incomplete. After the Prologue and a description of Armenia and Persia, the reader is drawn on an imaginary journey to the east-north-east. We are told of a great desert, difficult to cross, consisting “entirely of mountains and sand and valleys.” Perhaps he is describing what is now Xinjiang in western China. We are told about the Tanghut and Uighur populations, cultures that still survive in this region of contemporary China. The people are described as a mixed population of idolaters (in this case we can surmise he was describing Buddhists), Muslims and Nestorian Christians. Marco entertains the reader by describing their strange marriage and funeral practices, their agricultural production and their centers of learning devoted to liberal arts. His description ends with an enigmatic detail: So much, then, for that. Let us now speak of other regions towards the north, after remarking that Messer Niccolò and Messer Maffeo and Messer Marco spent a year in this city, but without any experience worth recording. So we shall leave it and start on a journey of sixty days towards the north. (Latham translation, p. 92) The name of the city they stayed in is given as Kan-chau in some versions, Campichu in others. Precisely what city this name refers to and what the Polos did there for a year is a complete mystery. As the story enters the Mongolian steppe, the writer promises: “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” In Marco’s version, the Mongols came from a region in the north to become subjects of Prester John. The source of the Prester John legend may have been a wish-fulfilling manuscript circulated during the Crusader invasions of Lebanon-Israel-Palestine, the area that is politically difficult to name in our own time. The Prester John legend described a powerful Christian king in the east who would join the Crusaders to defeat their enemies in the Islamic world. Marco equates this legendary figure with “a great lord who was called in their language Ung Khan, which simply means Great Lord.” He tells us that the Tartars chose as their leader “Chinghiz Khan, a man of great ability and wisdom, a gifted orator and a brilliant soldier”. Chinghiz unites the Tartars, then enters into a conflict with Prester John by requesting

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his daughter in marriage. A battle ensues, Prester John is defeated, and the expansion of the Tartars begins. Marco presents a lineage of the rulers descended from Chinghiz leading to his patron Kublai, “greater and more powerful than any of the others.” Then he tells us about the culture of the horse nomads. They live in circular felt houses, moving with their herds and carrying their possessions on two-wheeled carts drawn by camels and oxen. He describes their family life, their religion, their food and drink, their manner of dress, their military tactics, and their property laws. Perhaps Rustichello thought he was losing his audience with all these facts, so he inserts a digression to be more entertaining. “Here is another strange custom which I had forgotten to describe.” He adds a tale of posthumously marrying dead children to assure their happiness in the next life. Both his European audience and these foreigners hunted with falcons, so he describes a region to the far north where the best peregrine falcons are bred. At which point, he ends the background briefing, returns to Kan-chau, the city where the Polos spent their lost year, and starts out again on the journey to the court of Kublai Khan. The Franciscans missionaries from this period provide much more details about Mongol culture. The Persian historians Juvaini and Rashid al-Din provide a more comprehensive description of the lineage of the Mongol rulers, princes and military commanders. They were both officials in the Mongol government with access to all the records of the Empire, including records available only to members of the ruling families. Marco Polo may have worked for Kublai Khan but, unlike the Persians, he was not commanded by his patron to write a history of the Mongol conquests. The history Marco gives us is a condensed version synthesized from stories that he heard. While he gets some details wrong, what he tells us is essentially correct. The people he describes are recognizably medieval horse nomads. Written and oral traditions suggest that the Mongol tribes migrated from the Siberian taiga regions onto the steppe lands of present-day Mongolia, and this migration is supported by contemporary archeology. The battle between Chinghiz Khan and Prester John is a cliché of courtly romance, Rustichello’s way of making the story interesting. Prester John is understood today as a European fantasy, but the relationship and conflict between the man who initiated the Mongol expansion and the man Marco Polo identifies with the mythical king is confirmed by other sources. The Marco Polo-Rustichello version is a screenplay rewrite of events that actually took place. Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

Beneath the facade of medieval romance are the essential historical facts. In The Secret History of the Mongols, the Mongol’s own version of their history written several generations before Marco Polo time in Asia, we learn that the Kerait leader Toghrul was given the title Wang (Ung) Khan for his service to the northern Chinese kingdom. Toghrul and the younger Temujin – a Mongol leader later given the title Chinggis (Genghis) Khan – fought together against the Tatar, a tribe responsible for murdering Chinggis Khan’s father. That Toghrul and the rest of the Kerait leadership were Nestorian Christians provides a reasonable justification for associating him with the well-known legend of Prester John. Chinggis Khan pledged his loyalty to the Kerait leader in an arrangement similar to a medieval European knight pledging loyalty to his king. This alliance led to a power struggle involving an offer of marriage to Wang Khan’s daughter. The final battle in which Chinggis Khan defeated the Kerait army was an important moment in his early career. After the battle, the Kerait people were incorporated into the Mongol political and military structure, along with many other formerly independent groups. And we can see that this story, rather than being a misconception, may have been an example of Marco's Venetian shrewdness, choosing the conflict for Rusticello to transform into a romance that would be the most understandable for his European audience. *** Depiction of Wang Khan in "Le Livre des Merveilles", 15th century.

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Djengiz Khân & Toghril Ong Khan, Rashîd al-Dîn Fazl-ullâh, Djâmi' alTavârîh, c. 1430, Bibliothéque national de France

Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

Much of the criticism of Marco Polo’s book focuses on what it omits. When we consider that his book offers the reader a description of the enormous world connecting the Black Sea coast to Korea, the caravan routes connecting Armenia and Persia to China, reports of the islands of Japan, the mountains of Tibet, the cities and provinces of China itself and the sea routes linking the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the archipelago of Indonesia and the trading ports of East Africa and Arabia, there is plenty of opportunity to leave out any number of specific things. So let us imagine a more perfect Book of Marco Polo, a manuscript that will be discovered in the future, written in the very un-literary Venetian dialect that was our adventurer/explorer/hero’s mother tongue. This would be the ur-text that all these other French, Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Latin, German and even Irish versions are based on. In this manuscript all the problems raised by scholars and biographers over the centuries are solved. In this version Marco did learn Chinese and is well versed in Chinese history. He explains that the kingdom he lived in, formed by Kublai Khan’s war of conquest against the Song Dynasty, was the newly unified state incorporating a vast area that for the four hundred years following the dissolution of Tang China had been several separate countries. He explains that the northern kingdom already under Mongol rule when he arrived, where Kublai receives the Polos, was formed two centuries before by the Khitai, and that is why he calls the

country Cathay. Both this northern region and the southern kingdom which he calls Mangi, along with the country of the Tanghut in the west and Tibet in the south will later be known as China. After carefully explaining this, Marco Polo warns later generations of European geographers not to confuse one for the other or all of them for the same thing. He assists those of us attempting to trace his route from Venice to Cathay and back again on a contemporary map by admitting that he is not very precise in recalling the time it took to travel from one place to the next, at which point he carefully records the exact distance between each place he mentions. Then he points out the obvious: that the organization of the cities in his book has nothing to do with any specific journey. It is simply a way of describing the world he has seen. He warns the sea captains of the future. “Consider how poorly the people of our time understand the extent of Asia and Africa”, he tells them. “Therefore you should not take your own explanations of what you have never seen too seriously.” He tells them that the world he describes is far greater than any we could imagine. He puts in writing the deathbed statement often attributed to him in legend: “In selecting material for my book I have not told half of what I saw.” He adds a prophecy before closing this version of The Book: “In a dream I saw the word America written on a map. It is a name for the delusions of future mariners looking for the world I reached by land.” He conveys his hope that some readers of his book in the centuries to come will appreciate learning this from an ancient source.

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A thousand years from now, this lost manuscript will be found in a vault. Beside it will be a yellowed paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s great prose poem, Invisible Cities translated into English. The acid-laced paper it is printed on will have all but disintegrated. For those few who can read ancient languages, this one passage remains: Kublai asks Marco, ‘When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?’

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, Harvest Books, 1978, p. 106.

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‘I speak and speak,’ Marco says, ‘but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell as a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.’

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The Geometry of Time, After Piero della Francesca (a fiction)

Our memories of works of art have an existence that is independent of but contingent on the works themselves. The ratio of independence to contingency is perhaps determined not just by us – by the vagaries and deficiencies of memory – but also by the works themselves. Geoff Dyer, “Turner and Memory” I had a recurring dream when I was growing up. I cannot locate its appearance in time – I did not keep dream journals when I was 7 or 8 years old – but I can locate it in space because it began from the house where I grew up, a comfortable stucco-covered 10-room home situated on an acre of sloping land in the city of New Rochelle, New York. New Rochelle is a suburb of New York City that appears on the map as a long strip of land bounded by the Long Island Sound on the south extending north into the woods. The strip that became the city of 100,000 inhabitants in the 1950s had been purchased by a Dutch agent for a group of French Protestant refugees sent packing to the Low Countries by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Enlightenment radical Thomas Paine was granted an estate there by the infant New York State. Frederick Remington had worked there as a book and magazine illustrator mythologized the cowboys and Indians of the West. I spend my childhood in a neighborhood of large houses shaded by large trees on plots divided by hedges and driveways. The paved streets had no sidewalks. There were no sidewalks because there was no outside life in such a place. When I walked to school or to explore my neighborhood, the only sound I remember hearing was the machines of Italian gardeners trimming hedges and flocks of starlings massing in the trees. I have no memory of seeing joggers or even dog walkers. The streets I remember are places where I was the only moving person and the motion around me was entirely the cars, people driving cars, smoothly and politely gliding along the streets and disappearing into driveways. The dream began on the street in front of my house. Everything was still, more still than the actual scene I could Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

see from my bedroom window, because Time was stopped. Time was a flowing substance, a thing that moved, like the invisible atomic particles I saw in animated science films, and I was in the space between the particles, in the inevitable moment between one movement and the next. Nothing fell from the trees. Cars were immobile on the roads and in the driveways. I knew that if I went into a house, anyone inside would be standing like a statue, immobilized by their attachment to the flow of time, which had stopped. When I remember it now, it was always the same sensation. I could have been terrified or panic-stricken by this fundamental change in the universe, but my reaction was always closer to Alice in Wonderland. This space in Time was a curious fact like other curious facts, such as clouds that come and go or television programs to be turned on and off with the twist of a dial. I understood what had happened scientifically though I had no information as to why I was given this opportunity. I was the only thing not frozen, that was clear. And so I would explore things without the inhibition that anyone would notice what I did. I could open the doors of cars and sit in the driver’s seat. I could even drive the car or pick something up and move it, and tried to mentally solve the problem of what the others would see when Time began to move again and suddenly in an incalculable moment something that had been here was suddenly there. How does the neighborhood of one’s childhood, the primary substance of the familiar, become a foreign country? The familiar, the habitually perceived, is a combination of assumption and blindness. What we already know we don’t really see. Instead we fill it in with what we already know. Recognition, especially sudden recognition, is a mental state that ruptures our sense of time. We are here, we are here, we are here and then suddenly we recognize where we are, where we actually are, and everything snaps into a place that is as clear and sharp as it is discontinuous with the place we were. I was in my 20s when I was walking my dog along a path in the woods – another time living in another home in another town. I walked these woods repeatedly, nearly every day, spending hours exploring the paths that were largely former roads connecting the coastal villages to abandoned inland farms and granite quarries. That afternoon I had found an unfamiliar trail starting from the edge of someone’s property into the woods. I kept my eyes on the rocks and the plants, following my dog, trying to fit my direction into a mental map of the space I thought I knew, wondering where I was going. The narrow path was clearly there – had

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clearly been walked before – but the tree branches and ferns were close on each side, providing no visible openings. The forest tunnel suddenly came to an end at the juncture with a wide dirt path. One moment I was facing the trees on the far side of the path as I stepped out onto the dirt. I saw trees, dirt, pebbles, ferns, recognizing nothing. The next moment I turned my head to the right to look down the path I had joined. The entire visual field seemed to vibrate, focus, brighten and snap into place. I knew exactly where I was, on a road I had walked many times before. I had not moved and the transition from exploring the unknown to arriving in the known world had altered the appearance of every leaf on every tree. Twenty years passed. As I traveled on business in the US and Europe, I developed the habit of visiting art museums. I was in Milan and had the time to spend a few hours at Pinacoteca di Brera. My ability to look at European painting was darkly clouded by my ignorance of Catholic iconography. When I entered a museum gallery of early of Italian paintings – “early” here meaning from before the 15th century – I saw a lot of stiff-limbed haloed figures that meant nothing. The presentation of beheadings, variations of physical torture and bleeding crucifixions was the opposite of attractive. It was repellent but not even repellent in a forbidding or mysterious way. It was repellant to whatever sense of beauty I had developed growing up Jewish in a Protestant world, where medieval was another word for dark, violent and stupid. That day, however, as I crossed through a doorway into the 15th century and looked at paintings by Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Vittore Carpaccio and the brothers Vittorio and Carlo Crivelli, I finally saw the obvious: these people were painting the same things over and over and over again because the subjects they were painting were the subject of painting. There were no other subjects to paint because there was no other audience to paint for. It was not simply the fact that painting was a part of the decor of churches and chapels in private residences. It was also that their entire human audience understood these images as a complete visual language. Every man and woman and child was a saint or a soldier, a preacher or a listener, the Madonna or the child, an angel or a shepherd, a merchant in the Temple or a bishop in his robes. Bleeding Christs and mutilated Saints were the set of visual possibilities – there were no others – and it was the way in which the artist chose to reproduce them, his individual ingenuity, chosen point of view and sense of balance that was the subject of the art. My college education did not include art history but if I had Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

taken Introduction to European Painting I would not have seen the truth that day. I would have seen paintings that resembled slides that fit into a hierarchy of masterpieces. I would have recognized the names and remembered a chapter in a book and not seen what was in front of my eyes. As I began to see painting after painting in this new way, I came to the last of the 15th century galleries, Sala XXIV where there were very few paintings and the pathway turned to the right. I stood in front of “La Vergine con il Bambino e santi” (The Virgin with Child and Saints), a painting more commonly known as the Brera altarpiece and I could not move. This was my introduction to Piero della Francesca. I have no idea how long I stood there looking at the group of figures: the Madonna and child with six saints, four angels and one patron. I had no idea who the painter was nor could I identify the figures around the young woman on the throne with a sleeping baby draped across her lap. All figures in all paintings exist in two motionless dimensions, but these figures existed in a dimension all their own. What I could see was the absence of time. Which introduces the question: what does the absence of time look like? Any representation contains stillness, whether the figure is swinging a weapon, seated on a chair or floating in the air. Time is not represented by height, width or depth. It can be read like a text, from top to bottom and left to right, by the viewer’s eye scanning the image, searching for a representation of sequence. Our consciousness constructs a sequence from a motionless image by extrapolating dynamic potential from position. Looking at it now in a book or on a computer screen, I can see that the painting contains many suggestions of potential motion. On the right side of the Madonna’s throne, John the Baptist holds a wooden rod obliquely in his left hand and points the index finger of his raised right hand. This suggests that his pointing hand may have just come up or may eventually go down, while the perpendicular position of the rod could sway in either direction. Bernardino of Siena is obscured by the Baptist and Jerome so that only his head and a portion of his naked feet are visible. Saint Jerome’s right hand holds a stone against the bare skin of his chest. The hand seems to be pressed against his chest rather than in the act of striking it. To the left of the throne, Saint Francis of Assisi holds the base of a crucifix between the thumb and two fingers of his right hand so that the crucifix is precisely aligned with the horizontal and vertical plane of the picture, while three fingers of his left hand hold back the rip in his tunic exposing the wound on the right of his chest. The balancing gesture of the two hands is striking and precari-

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ous. Andrew the Apostle holds a book by his left hand at the bottom and with his right along the opposite corner on the top. His left foot turned toward the front is slightly raised, suggesting that he is just stepping into position. Between Francis and Andrew is the head of Saint Peter of Verona. This is the most obscured figure in the group, his entire body hidden behind his flanking saints and even a portion of his head obscured by Andrew. The tradition is that Peter was murdered by an axe blow to the head, so he often appears in paintings with a large blade embedded in the center of his skull. In this painting, the bleeding wound down the forepart of his skull is visible above his tonsure, but the cause of the wound is not. The appearance of his wound has not generated commentary, and it is difficult to find a close-up of his tonsured head in the literature. But I looked at it that day and I had the sensation that I had found my dream. What I saw was blood that did not flow – the liquid matter of life balanced on his skin. The swelling shape of a drop rested on the edge of the hairline. It held its place there with the dynamics of a drop of mercury. Only the smallest particle of time was needed for the constant vibration of molecules to realign, influenced by the gravitational forces of threedimensional space. But this was not about to happen because the painting displayed the complete absence of time. As I write this I am giving names to the figures, to add precision to what I saw, though naming them suggests I was involved in a cultural conversation when most of what I experienced was a meaningless buzz. I did not immediately associate my response to this image left by an Italian Renaissance artist with a dream of special powers to enter into a timeless solitude. I did immediately associate it with the thrill of being on the receiving end of the art experience. It is a great gift to experience this form of beauty, to feel changed by the presence of something. It doesn’t happen every day, and if it did, life would be exhausting. I described the painting to my Milanese host, an Italian computer scientist whose epicurean taste in food and wine extended to painting as well. He was thrilled that I liked Piero’s work. He was engaged in a project with another Milanese museum that was restoring their own Piero, a panel from a polyptych dismembered in the previous century and scattered to Milan, London, Lisbon and New York, with some fragments stopping in Princeton, New Jersey. He took me to a bookstore in the grand Galleria to show me a recent catalog of Piero’s collected works. I bought a few books to see pictures of the other paintings in various museums and churches. I told friends and family about this great Italian painter

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Zbigniew Herbert, “Piero della Francesca” PN Review 26, Volume 8 Number 6, July - August 1982. Reprinted in Writers on Artists, Daniel Halpern ed., North Point Press 1988.

I liked so much. I didn’t need to describe the painting or the blood on the martyr’s head – I only had to mention his name. Piero turned out to be a common object of fascination among poets, painters and art historians, so once I started things kept turning up. My mother, a visual artist always seeking the details of how people and places are interrelated, responded by photocopying an essay about Piero by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. On the last page of the photocopy she wrote: This is interesting though his descriptions [of several paintings] lost my interest. So Piero died as Christopher Columbus left to find the route to China (and/or escape the Inquisition). What was Leonardo da Vinci doing? And Michelangelo (writing poetry according to a book I bought). All of this is rather like describing the city of New York to someone in Mongolia by only speaking of one building built by one architect within whatever time frame it took including a tiny bit about politics & zoning permits, a tiny bit about unions & workmen, a still tinier bit about banking & cash flow & loans & interest and tell them to imagine New York City. In thinking about inventions of the printing press (about 1450) and the general opening up of information that made the Renaissance with its wars & plagues there may be a similarity to the invention of the computer in 1950. Is it making a Renaissance with wonderful men & women living amid wars and plagues (AIDS), five hundred years later? Is this a cycle in this part of the globe of the Earth? My mother is a native of New York City, the daughter and wife of men in the building trades, and the mother of a person who wrote about Mongolia. She never tired of trying to connect the dots of cultural history. The convention among art historians is to say we know little about Piero’s life, and Herbert’s essay emphasizes his anonymity. Just about everyone seems anonymous when compared to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, two of the world’s greatest overachievers. Scholars who search for such things have found a number of legal documents – work contracts, town records, and wills – that fix Piero’s existence in time and space. His life did end on Columbus Day, the beginning of American time. Whatever synchronicity exists among the invention of the printing press, European contact with the New World, the Italian Renaissance and the digital computer was something to explore. It was a fact that several of Piero’s works were being restored in the 1990s and others – the altarpiece

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that had stopped me in my tracks in Milan among them â&#x20AC;&#x201C; turned out to be enormously attractive to art historians and computer scientists. That attraction has to do with how the elements in his paintings are positioned in space, an aspect of his work that can be described in completely mathematical terms. Piero may not have left many biographical details, but the books he wrote on perspective and solid geometry survive. I could say he was a mathematician and a painter, or I could say that he brought mathematics to painting, or learned how to paint mathematically. In his own words: First is sight, that is to say the eye; second is the form of the thing seen; third is the distance from the eye to the thing seen; fourth are the lines which leave the boundaries of the object and come to the eye; fifth is the intersection, which comes between the eye and the thing seen, and on which it is intended to record the object. (Translated from Da Prospectiva pingendi by Martin Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 27) As he describes the mathematical model of light in space captured by the human eye, he is describing a reality in which the biological and the spiritual were joined by presence and substance. Martin Kemp sees these texts as having been written for a contemporary audience that included the painter, the mathematician and the humanist philosopher.

Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, Yale University Press, 1992.

The flavor of all this is clear: the deductive perfections of mathematics provide an active, a priori model of our understanding of experience, rather than arising simply from an empirical study of the sensory world. This formulation should not be taken to mean that Piero was blind to sensual delight â&#x20AC;&#x201C; far from it â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but that the framework of explanation was predetermined and absolute. (Martin Kemp, ibid., 27) After the invention of the computer, it did occur to several art historians to puzzle out what they had been looking at for 500 years by collaborating with graphics programmers. A software engineer engaged in computer graphics is recreating images of the world by expressing them as geometric solids covered by textures that respond to light sources. The rendering of objects in each image are constrained by the placement of a point of view according to the rules of visual perspective. Piero describes, and presumably employed,

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similar formulas and algorithms, powered by an abacus. All this goes a way to explaining the placement of objects – people, plants, architectural elements – in some of the paintings, but it does not explain what Piero wanted the person standing in front of his painting to see. Herbert’s essay testified to the possibility of a pilgrimage to northern Italy, where all the paintings once had been and most of them have come to rest. Piero’s most often discussed and reproduced paintings are in the National Gallery of London, but most of his work remains in or near the places where he created them. Herbert describes a journey to the central sites on the route: Piero’s hometown of Sansepolcro, the village of Monterchi, the city of Arezzo; the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia; and Urbino’s Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. For several years I looked at the paintings in books. There are very few paintings to look at and they are easy to distinguish from others of the period. I could never re-experience this halting of time by looking at a reproduction of the Brera altarpiece. Instead I became enamored of two repeating details: solid earth-bound angels and funny hats. I was pointed towards the angels by my friend and design teacher, Krzysztof Lenk, who recognized their role as security guards. Angels show up in many of the paintings – two beside the Madonnas in Urbino and Monterchi, a choir of five in the Nativity and a trio watching the Baptism in London. In the Brera altarpiece there are four flanking the Madonna. Where our view is not blocked by a foreground saint, their angel-ness is limited to the top of their wing rising like an epaulet behind each shoulder. Otherwise they are young seriously welldress androgynous wo/ men. The day I first saw the painting I didn’t think they were angels at all. Several of them are looking right at the viewer, unlike any of the other figures. Kris pointed out how this relationship between the Madonna and her guardians resembles a photograph of a president or prime minister on a public Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

stage. The important person is looking at someone in the distance or to the side, but behind him there is always a man with an ear-piece looking right at the person holding the camera. When looking at the Brera altarpiece, the person holding the camera is you. These angels never fly and barely spread their wings. They are solid, earthly walkers, often at a slightly smaller scale than the people their presence guards or supports. The major exception to this rule is the dramatic entrance – upper frame left hurdling towards lower frame right– of the angel carrying a vision of the cross to the sleeping Emperor Constantine in a panel of The Legend of the True Cross. All Piero’s figures are beholden to the intersection of solid geometry and the law of gravity. This streaking angel is the only time that he allows such potential energy to insert itself between a figure and the ground. I think he allowed it because this angel is not on earth with the rest of the figures. The angel is in Constantine’s dream. Which brings me to the subject of funny hats. Piero’s biggest fresco – the work that covers the most real estate – is The Legend of the True Cross. It is also Western Art’s biggest collection of funny hats. Giovanni Bellini’s “Venetian embassy to the Mamluks in Damascus” is a close second, but that is only a single painting representing a single event. Piero’s fresco cycle represents a narrative that goes from the death of Adam to the Queen of Sheba meeting King Solomon to the Annunciation to the Roman Emperor Constantine winning a battle to Constantine’s mother Helena finding the Cross to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius winning it back and returning it to Jerusalem. The story is told in ten compositions that cover three tiers on three walls. The nonlinear presentation can only be described with a diagram.

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There is an historical event that may explain the hats: the Ecumenical Council of Bishops that took place in Florence in 1439. The meeting attracted leaders of the Church from Egypt and Ethiopia and the Eastern Church from Greek Asia negotiating for support against Turkish expansion. Surviving documents testify that the twenty-somethingyear-old Piero was an assistant to Domenico Veneziano working in Florence that year, just as the Eastern bishops and their escorts were parading around the city in their formal attire. I imagine the assistant painter on his break, sitting outside the council chamber with his sketchbook, drawing the headpieces that to his geometrically-enhanced imagination sometimes resembled bell jars, sometimes plates and sometimes looked like cylinders balanced on the passing heads. What looks funny to me must include hats that were standard issue on the streets of Florence and Arezzo or common headgear in the armies fighting each other in Tuscany. All the intricate theories of contemporary political symbolism and all the identification of various figures with characters in the legend and patrons of the Franciscan church do not explain the sheer variety of headgear arranged throughout this fresco. I think Piero loved to draw hats because it allowed him to add more cones and cylinders, spheres and circles: extending the human head with solid geometry. I wanted to see the angels and funny hats in person. I wanted to know how the paintings would look in the places they lived, at their actual size. A springtime came when I had the time and means to make the trip with no other purpose than to see towns and the paintings.

Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

I started out alone in Milan, revisiting the Brera museum. The painting was much larger than my memory of it, more than eight feet tall. The room was not well lit. The Madonna’s face looked like smooth clay, shadows brushing across her left cheek. Her eyes were focused down on the sleeping child in her lap. I then spent several solitary days walking around churches, monasteries and museums in Florence. The density of artwork in Florence is an intense form of normalcy that kept my eyes busy looking at church walls and ceilings. I imagined that most of what I saw was here when Piero did his training. The walls are a visual primer of the saints and the stories that a 15th century painting can represent. I encounter multiple versions of the scenes Piero painted by other painters. The only painting by Piero himself is in the Uffizi – a wedding profile of Battista Sforza and Frederico da Montefeltro. The distinctly hawk-nosed Frederico was the same man kneeling in his armor before the Madonna and Child in the Brera altarpiece. The museum presents altarpieces by Filippino Lippi and the man Piero assisted, Dominico Veneziano, each of the Madonna and Child flanked by saints. Both were from the decade before Piero began working as a master. On the walls of Santa Croce I found Agnolo Gaddi’s frescos of the Legends of the True Cross. In the collection and the nearby churches were several versions of the Madonna della Misericordia, the image of Mercy as a woman sheltering supplicants under her open cloak. This theme carries with it the challenge of scale – how big does the embodiment of Mercy have to be in order to cover all the people under her cloak? I saw several solutions to the problem in the Uffizi collection, then later found myself standing before a version by Domenico Ghirlandaio in a chapel of the Ognissanti Church dedicated to the Vespucci family. Beneath Mercy’s cloak is the teenage Amerigo Vespucci, the man whose name the monks of St. Dié would place on their map of the New World. In Santa Maria del Carmine I saw the newly restored frescoes of the life of Saint Peter by Masaccio and Masolino. Masaccio’s figures were the beginning of powerful naturalism in faces, and his narrative compositions wove all of sacred time and place into the background of contemporary Florentine streets filled with everyday people. The panel where Saint Peter gives alms to the poor contains the solidness and weight that Piero maintained throughout his work. The naked buttocks of a child flatten against the forearm of the woman holding him.

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I was joined by my friend James Koller and we left the density of Florence for the towns where Piero’s major work resides. When we reached Arezzo, the restoration work on The Legend of the True Cross at the Basilica da San Francesco was still going on. There was good news and bad news. The good news was they had left the scaffold platform up after completing half of the restoration, giving us an extraordinary view of the first tier: the battle between the forces of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Persian Kind Chosroes. I could stare directly into the layer after layer of men and horses, the faces of soldiers and the brightly restored red of their wounds, instead of having to look up at them from the floor. There were some world-class funny hats. This panel is the only painting in which Piero shows people actively dying. Steel is going into flesh and blood is spurting, flowing and dripping. I stood in front of the soldier in the foreground about to die. He is forever on his knees, his shield over his head, his right arm with an open hand thrust out in front of the soldier who is grasping his hair in one hand and pointing his blood-stained sword toward him with the other. The paint representing the about-to-be dead man’s eyes has disintegrated beyond the powers of restoration, but bending towards him I could see he is already bleeding from the neck. Above I could see Saint Helena supervising the workmen unburying the crosses and the True Cross bringing a corpse back to life. On the third tier I could make out the funny hats of the procession returning the True Cross to Jerusalem. The bad news was that the other half was covered by drapes behind which we could hear the restorers scraping and stroking the fresco. Somewhere near the third tier, where I couldn’t see the death of Adam behind the plastic drapes, I could hear one of the workers talking on her cell phone.

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There was one other spot to visit in Arezzo, a dark corner in the Duomo beside the door leading to the museum of reliquaries. Here was the other work by Piero, the carefully executed Mary Magdalene gazing down off the wall. On close inspection the individual brown strands of hair are falling across her shoulders and a crystal jar is resting in one hand, glowing with light. I learned the origin of Mary Magdalene’s attribute – the jar – many years later at an exhibition about cosmetics at the medieval museum in Paris. The jar is a Roman woman’s makeup kit. Piero makes it look like a crystal cylinder reflecting the light of the cathedral windows on one side, illuminated on the other by a glow that seems to come from the saint’s left hand.

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Arezzo is a hilly town in a hilly region. The center is a square that tips downwards from the covered stone archways. It is a simple place without fashion shops or tourist hotels. A few years before our visit, Roberto Benigni used the hilly streets and un-modern facades as the set for his anti-Fascist comedy, Life is Beautiful. A life-size cardboard figure of Benigni leaned against the pillar by the cafĂŠ where we had a drink out of the sun. We drove a few miles to the village of Monterchi, a medieval hill fort beside the road to Sansepolcro. We stopped to view Pieroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Madonna del Parto. Herbert described visiting it in its former setting, a small chapel in the local cemetery. We found it relocated to a tastefully small museum on the side of the hill, thoroughly restored, behind glass, well lit and explained by a video, slide show and panels describing its restoration. We were the only visitors. I beheld a haloed woman parting her dress over a pregnant belly, flanked by two female angels holding back what appear to be the flaps of a tent. She may be the most earth-bound pregnant Madonna ever painted, biological fertility with a halo.

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The Tuscan countryside was soft and green in May. Jim and I walked up steep streets by narrow houses to the top of the fortress to look out over the fields. At the top was a place wide enough to turn around a car and a war memorial. The names of three British soldiers – two with Indian surnames – were inscribed in the stone. They lost their lives in 1943 disarming bombs set by the retreating Germans. This event involving a sapper unit of Englishmen and Sikhs was one of the seeds of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient. The frescos in Arezzo are briefly described in his book and make a small but dramatic appearance in the film adaptation. All the flickering drama of cinema images and somber literary references made the setting of Piero’s work seem touched by contemporary importance. The many books I had read and the movies I had seen were getting in the way of what I was trying to see. When we ended the day with the short drive to Sansepolcro, the quiet banality of the town cancelled out the literary and cinematic buzz. The mathematical painter did commissions for some of the wealthiest and most powerful men of his time, from Rimini to Urbino to Rome to Florence, but he always came back to Sansepolcro. This is where Piero grew up, served on the town council and spent much of his life. The hotel we stayed at was the Albergo Florentino, but the small town was a kind of anti-Florence. There was no elegance, no struggle in the air. The only power I could feel was the power of conservation – leave it the way it is. We had a walk around the old town and a quiet dinner at the hotel. The next morning we visited the Museo Civico to see the Misericordia and the Resurrection. The Polyptych of the Misericordia was the first of the altar compositions I saw that had not been dismembered. The central panel of Mercy sheltering four kneeling men and four kneeling woman is the part that is reproduced in books, but this leaves out two truths that confronted me in the dark museum gallery. First, this powerful image is surrounded by twenty more images of saints and scenes from Christ’s Passion. The image volume is visually overwhelming, making it difficult to focus on any single part, one reason why the whole thing is rarely reproduced. The second thing that makes it unreproducible is the technique: painting on gold. In Florence I had seen a display in the window of a restoration workshop illustrating how this is done: rabbit glue, red clay, gold leaf and then the paint made from egg tempera. The Misericordia and all the surrounding saints are painted on gold, which makes them float. It looks rather like painting on a mirror, only the gold mirror reflects not the image in front of it but an entirely yellow light. The figures are si-

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multaneously bathed in and silhouetted by this yellow light, which covers about a third of the polyptych’s surface. The naturalism of the kneeling figures is easy to see because they are sheltered from the gold bath by Mercy’s cloak. To the question “how big does the embodiment of Mercy have to be in order to cover all the people under her cloak?” Piero answers “big enough to cover everyone when holding out her arms.” In Ghirlandaio’s version in Florence, the Madonna and the supplicants are the same size, a feat he accomplishes by having the Madonna stand on a box and adding two angels to hold out her cloak beyond the reach of her hands. In Piero’s version, the size of the supplicants is based on the space available for four kneeling figures between the Madonna’s foot and the edge of her open cloak. This makes the size of the supplicants look normal and the Madonna appear to be a towering giantess with heavy eyelids. The four large saints on the side panels are of the same gigantic scale as the Madonna, though she is just a bit taller to underscore her central position, literally and symbolically. When art historians reconstruct the mathematical scaffold of the composition, everything lines up on a spider web of equilateral triangles and circles. But when I stood before it the geometric scaffold was invisible – I saw the relationships created by the figures. The points of Mercy’s crown aligned so precisely with the circle of her halo that the two together became a transparent golden hat. In their kneeling pose, the people’s heads rose above the knees I imagined beneath Mercy’s dress. Standing, their heads would come up to Mercy’s armpits.

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Standing in front of the Resurrection also neutralized an aspect of its reproducibility. This large composition is not painted on gold or wood. It is frescoed directly on the wall, like the paintings in Arezzo. The Museo Civico di Sansepolcro does not contain the Resurrection, it exists around it. The illusion of a framing – the columns, ceiling molding and floor – was destroyed when I stood in front of it – nothing came off the wall. With that illusion gone, I was looking at a wall that I wanted to pass my hand through. This time it was not a guardian angel staring back at the camera of my eye. It was a muscular Christ displaying the naked chest of an athlete, holding his victory pennant in his right hand, wearing his shroud draped like a toga, balancing one foot on the top of his tomb. His trainer should do something about that bleeding wound on his right side, I thought, before he leaps over the sleeping Roman soldiers to take his victory lap and wave his pennant for the crowd. I was looking at frozen time that seems to undulate in waves like a field of wheat in a slow-motion wind. The Roman soldiers were asleep – their eyes are as closed as Christ’s are open – but the body of each sleeper was aligned to a two dimensional plane that intersected the plane of the painted wall at a different angle. They were each leaning on invisible couches or held up by invisible strings that all lead my eyes deeper into the wall.

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What is it about the human face that creates a sense of recognition? Is there is a part of the human brain dedicated to reading and remembering faces? I recognized the face of the front-facing soldier without a helmet. The deformation of his head must have taken a long time to calculate with an abacus. It was tipped back so I could see the Adam’s apple on his neck and the lines under his chin. I had just seen him in the other room with open eyes, the front-facing kneeling supplicant beneath Mercy’s cloak. It made me think of watching films by Ingmar Bergman – how the faces of Max Von Sydow and Bibi Anderson keep reappearing in different roles. Many art historians remark how most of Piero’s figures, especially the Madonnas, look like common peasants, even as they carefully theorize the identity of uncommon patrons and other contemporary figures that appear in the paintings. I imagine Piero must have had his favorite models, local men and women willing to sit or stand for hours, the reperatory players he placed at different levels of his solidly geometric eternity. We drove south into Umbria to see the altarpiece kept in Perugia. The place I had expected to stay was closed and we end up in a luxury hotel for a very low price. It was evening when we walked into the center of town where the enormously heavy granite facades of the 15th century buildings made me feel light and insignificant. We had dinner, went to a movie and then emerged into the main square. It was midnight on a Friday evening and the university was still in session. The streets were filled with several thousand young men and women, standing and talking, sitting on the steps of the Duomo, sitting in the cafes and tea houses, looking at one another. Life was outside in the streets. We were both amazed by the casual density of the late-night outdoor crowd attending no discernable event, unlike anything in America. I wondered what the rules of engagement were. When we mentioned this to the night clerk, he told us it was a normal night. “During the jazz festival in June,” he said, “then it gets crowded.” I could see the full moon hanging over the Umbrian countryside from the window of the marble bathroom in our suite, a view from the toilet of an Italian prince. Piero’s altarpiece in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria was as well preserved and as it was visually jarring. It consisted of three small scenes from the lives of three different saints below the central golden space framed by arches in which the enthroned Madonna and Child were flanked by four standing saints. Above the archways was an Annunciation that featured the deep perspective of a receding colonnade. Seeing Piero’s paintings in a museum like this

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one, filled with dazzling paintings by many of his contemporaries, was distracting. I stood in front of it, trying to align myself with an imaginary altar, but without the surrounding church it was difficult to look at. We drove across the mountains to the Marche region. The landscape became dryer and the cliffs turned to limestone. We arrived in Urbino, the town where the hawk-nosed Duke Federico da Montefeltro ruled in the second half of the 15th century and collected an entourage of painters, architects and humanist scholars, including Piero. The Montefeltroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ducal Palace still looks like a fortress guarding the town. It is now the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, a designation that made it sound grander than it actually was. The Marche is a relatively poor region and the museum did not employ enough staff to guard its rooms. We waited with a dozen other tourists in a stately hallway for a guard to arrive who would lead us through the galleries. He unlocked each door, waved us in, relocked the door, stood by as we looked at the art and then unlocked the next room, which was the signal that we had to move on. This worked until we came to the room with the two Piero paintings. We were near the end of the tour. When the guard unlocked the next door and everyone but us went through, he looked at us from the doorway with a smile. Rather than bark something in

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Italian, he stood by the open door, nodded to me and left. It was okay with him for visitors to spend more time with the Flagellation of Christ. When I came into the room I first looked at the Senigallia Madonna, the Madonna and Child flanked by familiar angelic security guards. The painting is small and simple compared to the others – it is a quarter the size of the pregnant Madonna in Monterchi – and the smallness drew me closer. I was looking at a scene through a window – the feet of the figures and the floor were out of the frame. They stood in an anonymous room. It was not the usual sacred space of a church or even a chapel. The Madonna was centered, but the architectural detail in the background – an open doorway on one side and recessed shelves on the other – was asymmetrical. My pattern recognition was enhanced (or clouded) by having staring at so many of Piero’s paintings. The upright alert child she supports in her left arm was wearing the same coral necklace as the sleeping child in the Brera altarpiece. He was draped in the same Roman toga as the Christ standing on his tomb in the Resurrection. The hairdo, eyes, nose and lips of the angel guarding the rear doorway made me think of the angel staring at me in Milan. Suddenly their male sexuality was fixed and the one before me was the Milan angel’s older brother. When I looked at the other angel in a pink robe with a strand of pearls I realize that my mental sex change was driven by the comparison – the color of the robe and longer hair made me see her as a woman. The child, safe on his mother’s arm, his back covered by the angels, was staring at me and raising his hand in a very unchildlike way. Then I turned to look at the Flagellation. I knew there were an enormous number of details that make the Flagellation impressive before I looked at it. Like Piero’s polyptychs, it contains several architectural spaces, but in this painting they all fit in a unified geometric projection. One space, which includes two sections of the floor projected towards the viewer, contains a building with no exterior wall. Inside the rooms are five figures. They appear to be engaged in a scene from the Passion of Christ, the Flagellation. There are three figures standing in the other space where several buildings face each other beneath a blue sky. They appear to be engaged in conversation. Everyone is doing something, if only watching or listening to what others are doing. Over here, inside, someone is being whipped. Over here, outside, people are talking. The three men standing on the forward section of the floor are large, while the figures in the interior rooms standing several sections back are increasingly smaller. The two spaces are joined by perspective geometry, Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

which extends further into the composition to show more rooms behind the space where the flagellation is happening and more buildings behind the space where the three men stand. That attempt at objective description does not begin to describe the numerous interpretations put forth by art historians concerning the identity of the men standing around, why the young man in the middle is barefoot, what the men are talking about, where the light is coming from that illuminates Christâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s torture, why the seated man watching the torture is wearing the same funny hat as the victorious Emperor Constantine in Arezzo and generally what the painting is about. No one has found any document that describes exactly when it was painted or who it was painted for. That is as true today as it was the day in 1999 when I stood in front of it beside my friend Jim. This absence of context combined with Pieroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s compositional precision makes it the perfect space for generating theories of interpretation.

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When Bob Dylan was asked by a journalist what “Desolation Row” was about, he answered “about 15 minutes.” When I stood in front of the Flagellation that day, the most astonishing thing about it was its physical presence. It is painted on a small piece of wood, about two feet high and three feet long. Whatever frame it had is gone. The precisely painted surface is surrounded by unpainted worm-eaten wood that bows outward with age. It is a wonder that this amazing little enigma survives at all. The guard had gone on with the rest of the group by the time we went through the door and entered Frederico’s studiolo, a room whose walls were still covered by three dimensional illusions created entirely with different shades of inlaid wood. The flat wooden walls seemed to contain shelves and cabinets covered with objects: musical instruments, statues and books. These warm brown illusions are the only things that survive of the interior decor of the palace. In the last gallery another piece of wood hung frameless on the wall, the same height but twice the width of the Flagellation. Standing in front of this piece of wood that day, I recognized the true cognate of my dream. At first the most striking thing about the image was its harmony, the symmetry of the buildings that recede on each side of an

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open square containing a circular building finished with a conical roof. The receding facades are a regular pattern of columns, archways and windows in shades of white, gray, yellow and brown. The exterior of the central temple, with a welcoming half-open door, is an alteration of white columns and rectangular gray walls. Looking closer I saw the green plants in several windows, shrubs rising from a balcony, and a view of low green mountains in the receding distance. The label read “La Città Ideale, Scuola de Piero della Francesca.” No one knows who made it, though its perfect geometrical perspective is derived from Piero’s methods. The shape of the circular temple reminded me of the luminous jar in Mary Magdalene’s hand. Though it has the same form and is composed of the same material as the Flagellation, it wasn’t a painting at all. To be a 15th century painting it should repeat the subject of a painting, a story from the Christian Bible, or the life of a noble or a saint. Then I noticed the obvious: there are no people in the Ideal City.

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Centennial Sauvage: the survival of Tristes Tropique

The Birthday Party In December 2008, I read an article in an American newspaper describing an event that took place the week before. November 28 had been Claude Lévi-Strauss’ one hundredth birthday. Friends and admirers staged “Claude Lévi-Strauss à 100 Ans”, a day-long public performance of his work at the Musée du Quai Branly. As Lévi-Strauss declined to attend the event, the French president made a ceremonial visit to his home. By the time I read the news, I had already missed the event. I was surprised to learn he was still alive. The French anthropologist had not intersected with my life in many decades. But now the train had arrived, I was standing on the platform and I already had the ticket in my pocket. I decided it was not too late to add my own thoughts to the celebration. I went to the collection of books I had brought to France from America and started to read my old copy of Tristes Tropiques. This was the book, written for a popular audience in the early 1950s, that for many readers defined his place in France and in the world. I re-read it, then read the later English translation and the French original, trying to understand how it came to be, what is was made from and just who had inherited what from whom. It is an amazing work of literature. A lot of water has gone under all the bridges that cross the Seine since it appeared in 1955. Many –isms and many schools of thought have come and gone. No one ever wrote another book like this one. Its mix of anthropology, travelogue, social criticism and autobiography fits no specific genre. The year it was published, the jury for the French Goncourt literary prize apologized for not selecting it only because it was not a work of fiction. Perhaps they missed their chance to redefine what fiction was about to become. Claude Lévi-Strauss is a writer who views humanity in terms of universals, but Tristes Tropiques is about the specifics of a life – a telling of one man’s experience. The book is filled with the tension between a world of things and actions and behaviors and the mind of a writer who thinks in terms of ideas and methods and analysis. The reader can see Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

something that maintains a cloak of invisibility in his other works – the birth of a technique and the formation of an attitude that is part affinity, part training and part rebellion. He addresses his French audience directly. In his reflexive tone and surprising assertions, he affirms his reader’s intelligence. He means to surprise from the opening lines, a travel book that begins: “I hate travelling and explorers.” The autobiographical narrator secretes layers of irony that separate the author from the imperfections of the world. As he tells his life story, I get the sense that irony is natural to the way his mind works, as the imperfections of European culture threaten to intrude on the universal analytic thought process he was trained to practice. His writing consists of pivoting, shifting movements between descriptive metaphor and logical analysis. The book is divided into nine parts, but this is the lower level of its structure. Above the details, the work is the dramatic monologue of a memorist, a theatrical performance, divided into three acts. The first act (Part One through Part Four) describes his French education and experience of traveling to and from Brazil as a teacher of anthropology. The time is the 1930s, but the narrative is cyclical, with later memories intruding on earlier ones. This first confrontation with the New World draws to a close with observations of the newly formed state of India in the 1950s. His observations of these alien cultures form a summary of the present state of humanity. The second act (Part Five through Part Eight) is devoted to ethnography. He returns to 1935 and describes the four Brazilian Indian groups he visited and studied during his field work. The groups are presented in a series that begins with analogies to European feudal order – the Caduveo are described as the remains of a Brazilian Indian ruling class – and then moves on to the “uncivilized” Bororo, the Neolithic and nomadic Nambikwara, and the more remote bands of Tupi-Kawahib surviving in the area farthest from the EuroBrazilian world. The third act (Part Nine) is a coda. It is devoted to the author’s return to civilization and sense-making. In the present, he is back in India, meditating on several thousand years of human experience. He relates his experience of the beliefs, material culture, kinship systems and aesthetics of the New World to religious and social systems of the Old World. First Encounter I first read the book in 1968. If I remember correctly, my encounter was not during the spring of 1968, when some solar wind blowing from East to West and back again disturbed

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the adrenaline and testosterone of large groups of people in their 20s. I did not read it in the spring watching urban riots in Washington, participating in campus occupations in New York, fleeing police massacres in Mexico City, facing Soviet tanks in Prague, displaced by the Red Guard in the Chinese countryside or stoned out on a country commune in Vermont where the veneer of suburban refinement gave way to maggots churning in the compost and mice rattling the rafters over the bed. No, it was in the confusing fall of that same year when I returned to the village in Ohio that was my chosen college town, the place fate dropped me through a series of baitand-switch operations I was too slow to catch. The entire structure of civilization seemed fragile by then. It was like a thin mesh of glass filaments, rigid and brittle. Everywhere I looked people were disobeying orders, crossing lines that were not meant to be crossed, walking through walls. Each time it happened to me or my peers, we were not sure our molecules would reassemble in the same way on the other side. In the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, sliding down the interstate network that connected every major city and suburban development with every other city and suburban development â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for the greater good of homogenization and access to shopping malls â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the speed at which the molecules of my body and the bodies of those beside me accelerated towards some future position illuminated by the twin headlights was greater than or equal to the sound of a drum solo playing on the radio. We were looking for the answer buried beneath the trivia already embedded in the waxy DNA of young media-drenched minds, and hoping that somewhere down the road we would find someone who would tell us where to find it. That fall I took an elective class in the religion department from a newly arrived and very young professor named Jee-Gook Kim. The class had a vague title, something like comparison of religions. Jay, as people learned to call him, was Korean-American and had recently graduated from a college in Staten Island. I grew up around New York and thought I was pretty sophisticated. I knew where Staten Island was. It was the place where you go on the Staten Island ferry and then return without bothering to get off because thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing there to see. I knew that Korea was where we won a war against Communists around the time I was born, much like the war that was going on in Vietnam that we all wanted to avoid. This small town in Ohio contained only one thing, a school that had begun as an Episcopal seminary in the early nineteenth century and become a liberal arts college for 700 Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

men. We all took our meals in a Great Hall modeled on an Oxford college, with stained glass depicting authors from the pantheon of British Literature. The last group of Anglican seminary students had abandoned the place the year before. Attending the church had been optional for decades and, as one student after another refused to wear a tie and jacket for this or any other occasion, the formal Sunday lunch meant to follow services was rapidly degenerating into just another meal. In this aquarium, where all the fish swimming about knew each other by sight if not by name, Professor Kim did not fit. No one was surprised but some of us were disappointed when he did not come back for a second year. He had little patience with the way students responded to his teaching style. The books he assigned us were difficult because they were not about any form of religion we knew. But the most difficult part was that he expected us to read and discuss these books without telling us what we were supposed to say about them. The first book he assigned was The Sexual Life of Savages by Bronisław Malinowski. The title certainly caught our attention. The sexual life of college students was a constant subject of discussion. Reading about an anthropologist making notes on the sex life of people in the South Pacific was more interesting than reading Plato or Kant and easier than reading Chaucer. At least Malinowski’s book had photographs. The detail I still carry with me was the discussion of what constituted marriage on the Trobriand Islands. Similar to the situation in the dormitories, it was not a question of whether a young man and woman had sex with each other. Anyone could do that with anyone, apparently. The man was married to the woman if they had sex and then went to her parents’ house the next morning to share breakfast. I made a note of that. The second book was Tristes Tropiques. What we had in our hands was an American edition of the British translation done by John Russell in 1961. It had appeared in England with the title “A World on the Wane”, an attempt to the translate alliteration without sense. Fortunately, when the American edition appeared two years later the author was already famous, so the more exotic and opaque French title had returned. By 1968, the name Lévi-Strauss was enough to sell the book, even if Americans didn’t understand what the title meant. This was an assigned text, we didn’t have to understand. The cover claimed it was a book about “primitive societies in Brazil”. That advertisement and the photographs of naked Indians were reassuring. Without them it was hard

Tristes tropiques, translated from the French by John Russell. Criterion Books, 1961. (TT/JR)

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Tristes tropiques, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman. Penguin Books, 1973. (TT/JDW )

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to understand why I was reading over 150 pages of travelogue and social criticism with no natives in sight. Finally, the natives appeared and the author convinced me that the people he described and photographed lived in poverty, but at the same time he invited me to marvel at their happiness and energy in the face of a cruel world. He had a unique way of describing how the natives create artistic expression from the simplest things – patterns painted on their skin, feathers, strings, and folded leaves. Near the center of the book I was confronted with my first shaman. He was the author’s unintended roommate during his sojourn in a Bororo village. The local name for this role was bari, and I underlined portions of the description. “The bari is asocial. … But the bari is also under the dominion of one or more guardian spirits. … The old adage about the quick and the dead here takes on an unexpected and terrible significance; for, between the spirit and the sorcerer, the bond is of so jealous a nature that one can never be quite sure which of the two partners is, in the end, the master, and which the servant.” (TT/JR:221). My own unintended roommate that year, a gifted photographer, was similarly mysterious. He had inherited the Asian features of his Japanese mother and the Washington DC culture of his Jewish father. When I looked at him I was never sure which side was looking back. At the time I did not have the linguistic or intellectual tools to see how the British translator had deformed the author’s metaphor in the passage I underlined. Russell had substituted an ambiguous reference to the King James Bible – ‘who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead’ (1 Peter 45) – for a French legal reference – ‘Le mort saisit le vif’ (the dead seize the living). John and Doreen Weightman, who re-translated Tristes Tropiques twelve years later and went on to produce English versions of much of Lévi-Strauss’ later writing, explain that the legal term means “the heir is immediately invested with the possessions and prerogatives of the dead man.” It would have been interesting to hear that in 1968. During this time when a search for authenticity and roots was commingling with the desire to survive the latest war, many of us were looking for a spirit to invest us. I didn’t grasp the shape of the book reading the Russell translation. After reading it again, I read the second Weightman translation and began to see how Lévi-Strauss actually presented the balance between the Old and New Worlds. I discovered the parts Russell left out: the three chapters about India that conclude the first act, and a chapter and a half about India in the third.

I also found copies of the original French (Plon) edition. The first copy I found was on the shelf in a friend’s living room, beside others from the same Terre humaine series. Here I discovered that the French edition contained sixtythree photographs, three times the number included in the English edition. The second copy was on a sagging shelf in another friend’s country house in Normandy. As I flipped through it, I could smell the fifty years of moisture and dust that had settled on the edges of the pages. The current paperback edition is easy to find in the larger bookstores of Paris. Ten years before, his French publisher had produced a large edition of just the photographs Lévi-Strauss and his associates had taken in Brazil. The black and white images have a powerful charm of their own, quite independent from the prose. They stand as evidence of the author’s presence in an exotic world similar in many ways to the images of nineteenth century explorers in the Americas and Africa. At the same time the portraits of the men, women and children he studied exude a sense of the photographer’s intimate contact with fellow human beings.

Tristes tropiques, par Claude LéviStrauss. Plon, 1955.

The French Modernist In the first act, Lévi-Strauss describes how he taught himself to do what he is doing. He was trained in “mental gymnastics” at the Sorbonne where he took the agrégation, an exam that is unique to the French education system. The candidates spend a year studying a general topic. If the candidate survives the written exam – an essay on a question within the chosen topic, he wins the chance to perform the oral examination. For the oral, the candidate draws a question at random, has a few minutes of preparation, and then presents an hour-long discourse. Lévi-Strauss tells us he passed the exam on the first try, as the youngest candidate. “I was confident that, at ten minutes notice, I could knock together an hour’s lecture with a sound dialectic framework, on the respective superiority of buses and trams.” (TT/CDW: 52). The French State awards the agrégé a guaranteed teaching position for life. And so, when he was chosen in his mid-20s to fill a teaching position at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil, he was already a master at describing, bifurcating, comparing and moving on. This first act contains the marvelous “Sunset” chapter, an exam which tests the reader’s patience and attention. It is marvelous in the way it demonstrates the technique LéviStrauss brought to his chosen field and frustrating in the way it embodies the very boredom he describes. The chapter begins by telling the story of his first journey by ship from France to Brazil, but quickly switches to an account of the

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anxiety (though he never calls it that) felt by a young man about to face the new trial of ethnographic observation. The ethnographer must be able to quickly and precisely describe what he sees and does not understand. The virgin ethnographer decides to train himself by describing the rising and setting of the sun. If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then – so it seemed to me – I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession: however strange and peculiar the experiences to which anthropological research might expose me, there would be none whose meaning and importance I could not eventually make clear to everybody. (TT/CDW: 62) At which point he switches from the memoir into the moment and reproduces a description and comparison of sunrise and sunset “written on board ship”. It was the young writer’s self-applied exam, and it is a trial for the reader to complete. What is to be learned by going on? The sun rises and the sun sets. The light changes. The reader who succumbs to boredom and skips ahead to the next chapter is missing the point. The value of this chapter is not in the description it presents, it is in the pattern. Actions and shapes are described in pairs. Sentences are built from words that alternate color, texture and direction. Metaphor is inserted to stretch and pivot the mind’s eye from one moving piece to the next. Innumerable networks of vapor suddenly appeared in the sky; they seemed to be distributed in all directions horizontally, obliquely, perpendicularly and even spirally. The sun’s rays, as they gradually declined (like a violin bow which is placed at different angles to touch different strings), made each network in turn explode into a spectrum of colors that one would have said was the arbitrary and exclusive property of each. At the moment when it showed itself, each network had the clearness of outline, the exactness and fragile stiffness of spun glass, but then it slowly dissolved, as if its substance, overheated through exposure in a flamefilled sky, were darkening in color, losing its individuality and spreading out in an ever-thinner layer until it disappeared from the scene, at the same time revealing Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

another, freshly spun network. At the end, all that was left were blurred blues running into each other, just as liquids of different colors and densities, poured one over the other into a transparent bowl, slowly begin to blend, in spite of their apparent stability. (TT/CDW: 66) The pattern of this one paragraph is a violin bow on spun glass melting into liquid colors mixing in a glass bowl. If the reader passes this trial by fire, he is a convert ready to enter the New World. In “The Structural Study of Myth”, a paper presented the year before publishing his memoir, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated a form of analysis that is so radically a-historical that it seems to leave folklore, ethnography and narrative behind. “What if patterns showing affinity,” he asks, “instead of being considered in succession, were to be treated as one complex pattern and read as a whole?” (SA: 211) What if I took all the stories in the world, cut them up into pieces, and arranged them into patterns that explained not what any one story means but what the human mind is actually saying by telling stories? Think of folklore studies as a card game, a magnificent game of Human Solitaire. The aesthetic he proposes, if we think of it for a moment as an aesthetic rather than a method of scientific or philosophical analysis, is the aesthetic of Modernist poetry. This was being done by many European poets of the time, but none had Lévi-Strauss’ sense of irony nor his scientific ambition. In this scientific paper, which became a chapter in his book Structural Anthropology, he promised to demonstrate the patterns of affinity in myth. He deliberately chooses a myth more closely associated with Classics and Literature (not to mention Freudian psychology) than with anthropology: the Oedipus myth, and then qualifies his demonstration with a metaphor.

Structural Anthropology, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated from the French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Basic Books, 1963 (SA)

“The ‘demonstration’ should therefore be conceived, not in terms of what the scientist means by this term, but at best in terms of what is meant by the street peddler, whose aim is not to achieve a concrete result, but to explain, as succinctly as possible, the functioning of the mechanical toy which he is trying to sell to the onlookers.” (SA: 213) His conclusion – that the Oedipus stories are about two irreconcilable beliefs – that mankind comes from the Earth and at the same time comes from human parents – is bril-

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liant and convincing. It is surprising to have an ethnographer, whose domain is the thought of primitive cultures, explain the myth of a culture that every educated European knows is the foundation of his superior worldview. But it is less surprising than the irony of his comparison. A scientist presenting a paper at an academic conference is like a street peddler selling mechanical toys. If LéviStrauss had read more Mark Twain and less Rousseau he could have added something about selling snake oil. Out of India The three chapters omitted from the first act by the first British translation of Tristes Tropiques are a leap from Brazil in 1937 to India (and the unnamed country of Pakistan) in 1950. Lévi-Strauss sees in India a cultural apocalypse. Civilization begins in this cradle of the Indo-European Old World and now it is the complete degradation of human culture that he senses as a visitor. “The Magic Carpet”, a view of the earth seen from an airplane moving from France across Egypt to Pakistan and across India to the frontier of Burma, ends with an analysis of why this region is so destitute. “Europe, India, North America and South America” the author informs us, “can be said to illustrate the possible range of combinations between geographical settings and density of population.” (TT/ JDW, 133) He is appalled and revolted by what he finds in India. He sees colonial history and parliamentary democracy as so much veneer covering a social arrangement that has been in place for thousands of years. His analysis is based entirely on the density of population in relation to the physical resources. People in India treat each other in an inhuman way in order to reduce the number of humans per square foot. Nowhere in Tristes Tropiques does Levi-Strauss mention why he was in India and Pakistan in the early 1950s. At the time he was a representative of UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations. “Claude Lévi-Strauss and UNESCO” by Wiktor Stoczkowski, The UNESCO Courier, 2008, Number 5. (CLSU)

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The first contribution of Claude Lévi-Strauss to the deliberations of UNESCO goes back to 1949: he participated then in the international commission of scholars entrusted with drafting the first UNESCO declaration on race, published consecutively in 1950. In the same year, he was commissioned by UNESCO to carry out an inquiry into the state of social sciences in Pakistan. In 1951, he sat on the committee of experts convened to set up the International Social

Science Council, of which he was the first SecretaryGeneral, from 1952 to 1961. In 1952, on the request of UNESCO, he wrote Race and History, which was to become a classic of antiracist literature. (CLSU, 5) This is from a summary of Lévi-Strauss’ contributions to UNESCO published to mark his centennial celebration. The same issue of the The UNESCO Courrier reprints several articles he wrote about the economic and cultural situation of Pakistan in those years, which contain several arguments that reappear in Tristes Tropiques. There is a presentation of the “pearl button crisis”, an analysis of globalized local markets that is both prophetic of our present time and an accurate description of the year it was written. In the articles, he is a social scientist hoping to influence international development policy, focusing on potential remedies. When he reworks the experience in his memoir, his hopeful suggestions are transformed into expressions of disgust. Lévi-Strauss did not seem to believe in the idea of progress. He certainly did not believe in ideologies. “Ideologies are signs which only constitute a language in the presence of the objects to which they relate” (TT/JDW, 149) he writes, and then uses India to explain Europe’s own crimes against humanity during World War II. India’s great failure can teach us a lesson. When a community becomes too numerous, however great the genius of its thinkers, it can only endure by secreting enslavement. Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades. Then it becomes necessary to extend the process of expulsion. When looked at in this light, at the culmination of a century during which the population figures have doubled, [...] can no longer appear as being simply the result of aberration on the part of one nation, one doctrine, or one group of men. I see them rather as a premonitory sign of our moving into a finite world such as southern Asia had to face a thousand or two thousand years ahead of us, and I cannot see us avoiding the experience unless some major decisions are taken. The systematic devaluation of man by man is gaining ground, and we would be guilty of hypocrisy and blindness if we dismissed the problem by arguing that recent events represented only a temporary contamination.

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What frightens me in Asia is the vision of our own future which it is already experiencing. In the America of the Indians, I cherish the reflection, however fleeting it may have now become, of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it. (TT/JDW, 149-150) It is with this send-off, this setup of his memory of tropical America as the humane opposite of teeming inhuman Asia of today that he begins act two: his account of the American Indians. Uniting the Americas Tristes Tropiques does not pitch structural anthropology, but the author uses the structural method to disarm the reader’s mind with parallels that reflect and refract thought in several directions simultaneously. If Lévi-Strauss had died at the age of 50 rather than living past 100, we would still have the seeds of each idea he later proposed in this book. In the center are chapters about living with the Bororo and these chapters contain a new focus, as if the description of his education in France and his years teaching in Sao Paolo were the Joycean dream he was about to awake from. He sees the Bororo living in a cultural harmony consisting of a physical arrangement of buildings, social relationships and metaphysical beliefs. He draws a diagram of the village, bifurcated by kinship boundaries that are related to both cardinal directions and the flow of the river. In the center of the circle is the men’s house. This abstract geometry is the harmony of the world. The most overt piece of structuralism in the book is his observation of this village. The circular arrangement of the huts around the men’s house is so important a factor in their social and religious life that the Salesian missionaries in the Rio das Garças region were quick to realize that the surest way to convert the Bororo was to make them abandon their village in favor of one with the houses set out in parallel rows. Once they had been deprived of their bearings and were without the plan which acted as a confirmation of their native lore, the Indians soon lost any feeling for tradition; it was as if their social and religious systems (we shall see that one cannot be dissociated from the other) were too complex to exist without the pattern which was embodied in the plan of the village Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

and of which their awareness was constantly being refreshed by their everyday activities. (TT/JDW: 220-221) Note that the Bororo world is not described as primitive or fragile. It is described as “too complex” to survive being disturbed. He is also deeply impressed by what he witnesses inside the men’s house. As the center for cultural exchange, it embodies an easy mixture of sacred and profane activities. Lévi-Strauss describes his own relationship to French society in subtle and delicate ways. He omits any mention of his own family relationships. Nowhere in the book does he mention his parents, nor does he refer to Dina Dreyfus, his first wife who accompanied him during his fieldwork in Brazil. But as I re-read his description of how the sacred and profane mixed in the Bororo men’s house, I noticed an exception to this rule, an ironic and bitter reflection on his own childhood. This casual attitude to the supernatural was all the more surprising to me in that my only contact with religion dated back to childhood when, already a nonbeliever, I lived during the First World War with my grandfather, who was Rabbi of Versailles. (TT/JDW: 230). The passage that begins with this sentence is the only direct reference to his family anywhere in the book. It tells us that at the age of 8 or 10, our hero is already convinced that his own religion is meaningless. Early in the book, he tells us he left France in 1941 when “I already felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp.” (TT/JDW: 24). At that point in history, he was a Jew by descent, not by conviction. The secular Jew fleeing Vichy France had long before confronted the religion he did not believe in during the national trauma of The Great War. He was not just any secular Jew. He was the grandson of a rabbi. And not just any rabbi. His grandfather was the rabbi of the very wealthy city of Versailles. And from that opening sentence, Lévi-Strauss contrasts the “arid” synagogue in the city created by Louis XIV with the “casual” men’s hut of the Bororo village in the Mato Grosso of Brazil. The house was attached to the synagogue by a long inner passage, along which it was difficult to venture without a feeling of anguish, and which in itself formed an impassable frontier between the profane world and that other which was lacking precisely in the human

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warmth that was a necessary precondition to its being experienced as sacred. Except when services were in progress, the synagogue remained empty and its temporary occupation was never sustained or fervent enough to remedy the state of desolation which seemed natural to it and in which the services were only an incongruous interruption. Worship within the family circle was no less arid. (TT/JDW:230-231). The negativity of this statement is characteristic of the profound alienation found throughout Tristes Tropiques. This negativity may be peculiarly French, and some of its tone was completely lost in the Russell translation. For example, Russell translates: “Only my grandfather’s silent prayer before each meal reminded us children that our lives were governed by a higher order of things.” (TT/JR: 215) The Weightman translation carries the more negative flavor of the French original: “Apart from my grandfather’s silent prayer at the beginning of each meal, we children had no means of knowing that we were living under the aegis of a superior order, but for the fact that a scroll of printed paper fixed to the dining-room wall proclaimed the motto: ‘Chew your food well for the good of your digestion.’” (TT/JDW: 231). As I reread Tristes Tropiques, I was struck by the depth of Lévi-Strauss’ alienation from the French culture he sprung from and returned to. He left it by chance, a phone call that changed his life and gave a young high school teacher a chance to become an ethnographer in Brazil. The Mato Grosso wilderness was a New World in flux, a mixture of all the forces defining the modern world. It was also a place devoid of French domination, intellectual or political. The lack of domination did not preclude the presence of French influence, and Lévi-Strauss notes it repeatedly. In Brazil, he had the advantages of a White Man without a Colonial burden. It was a world in which he perceived a profound harmony, unlike what all his Anglo-American or Brazilian colleagues perceived before him. In the midst of his description of the tribal bands he visited, Lévi-Strauss proposes that the Americas should be understood as a single cultural complex. He does not say a single civilization. He is deducing millenniums of inter- and intra-tribal contact and population movement, the rise and fall of centralized states in the precarious narrative that was Pre-Columbian history being struck on many sides by new archeological data. He makes this proposal in a chapter called “The Lost World”. He begins by telling about his longest and last field expedition in Brazil, starting with a Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

description of purchased beads and thread in the district around the Carrefour Réaumur Sébastipol “an area of Paris as unknown to me as the Amazon” (TT/JDW, 249). This was the wholesale cloth and notions district, and is still today a part of Paris filled with wholesale shops dealing in jewelry materials, notions and accessories, as well as uncut cloth and leather. He launches into a justification of his plan to visit a cross-section of the surviving Brazilian culture groups, and from there into his hypothesis that all the cultures of South, Central and North America share a common system of mythological thought. Arguing this hypothesis would take up much of the second fifty years of his life. I was drawn to re-read this chapter again by the reproductions of Hopewell designs he reproduced to illustrate his hypothesis. In the late 1970s I had the task of gathering information about the publishing program at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. I was working for the university administration and the purpose of the investigation was to contain, if not to halt, a publishing program that someone in the administration thought was a waste of money. I was sent to interview a Mr. Philip Phillips, who was the author, as well as underwriter, of a particularly elaborate multi-volume work, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma. The volumes reproduced tracings of the designs found on large conch shells carved by a pre-contact native group known as the Hopewell culture. The books were in a very large format, rather like the Audubon folios of bird engravings produced in the nineteenth century, and the multi-volume set cost hundreds of dollars. Mr. Phillips lived in a lovely house in Harvard, Mass., a wealthy rural community west of Boston. The British professor who had taken over as director of the Peabody Museum was an archeologist who specialized in a region that had been politically closed to European and American archeologists by the recent Iranian Islamic Revolution. Perhaps he was trying to get his revenge by attacking the New World. He scoffed at how his predecessor, the Americanist who sponsored the publication, was treating these shell fragments scratched up by pre-historic Indians as if they were “the Elgin Marbles”. Elgin Marbles sounded more valuable than conch shells from Oklahoma. It was to be another decade before I saw the pieces of Greek relief sculpture on the walls of the British Museum and heard the story of how these trophies had been removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin. Mr. Phillips was a very wealthy alumni, I was told, so one must be tactful. He was the Phillips of Phillips Milk of Magnesia and his wife was Niagara Power and Light. This third volume was to be his last. The academic world was and

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still is a treacherous place for minds that seek large patterns. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss searches through the evidence and theories available to him for just such patterns. By the 1950s there was more new archeological and linguistic speculation about cultural migrations than there had been in the 1930s when he did his field work. Between his time in Brazil and his time in India, he had spent the war years living in New York, teaching and arguing with American anthropologists and the linguist Roman Jakobson. Now he was speculating about the connectedness of the cultures of the Americas before the coming of the Europeans, proposing a world less isolated than Americanists made it out to be. “It is as if American specialists were trying to impose on primitive America that absence of depth characteristic of the contemporary history of the New World.” (TT/JDW: 253) He wants to challenge the conventional wisdom of the time, in which the entire population of the Americas was viewed as a mysterious group of Others isolated from all the other Others of the planet. He wants to explain the similarities among American cultures in relation to other geo-regional cultures that might have had contact with American territory. He settles on South-East Asia – specifically Indonesia for reasons he never develops – and Scandinavia. He sees them forming “the trigonometrical points of the preColumbian history of the New World.” (TT/JDW, 256) It is a startling proposal, characteristic of how he leaps towards ideas that challenge the assumptions of specialists. He does this in an ahistorical and matter-of-fact way, without recounting or analyzing the long tradition of disproven contact theories that have flourished in North America. He doesn’t mention the Vineland Saga, tales of Celtic monks who sailed to the west, or theories of one group or another being descended from the lost Tribes of Israel. These were the ideas of Pre-Columbian contact that thrived in the nineteenth century. I thought immediately of Charles G. Leland and his treatment of Algonquin stories as aligned with, if not derived, from Scandinavian-Germanic traditions. Without the rigor of Lévi-Strauss’ logic, or the benefit of twentieth century archeology, Leland saw what he wanted to see. He saw Algonquin tales as more understandable if we recognized their similarities to European tales, which were understandable because, by definition, they were ours. But are these isolated New World inhabitants similar to us, or are we, the descendants of a Europe cut off from the formative cultures of the Old World, similar to them? LéviStrauss turns the proposal around every elegantly: “We now have to correct a second mistake, which consists in assuming that America remained cut off from the world as a whole Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

for twenty-thousand years, because it was separated from Western Europe. Everything would seem to suggest rather that the deep silence on the Atlantic side was offset by a buzz of activity all along the Pacific coasts.” (TT/JDW, 257). We will understand the Americas to our West by seeing how they are related to Asia, and we, the French at another edge of the migration, are also related to the same cultural center far to the East. The Earth from Above Reading Tristes Tropiques today as an adult who has spent a decade in France was not so different from reading it as an American college student in the 1960s. It still seems to be a report of the Earth written by someone from another planet. Unless you are also French, the long introduction to the author’s education is amusing – what student has not experienced their professor droning on about some intellectual subject and imagined a beet root with whiskers – but it does not make you think he is describing anyone’s home. The narrator, who tells us that travel books teach us nothing, seems to always be traveling through an alien world – the nearly empty steamships moving between the Mediterranean and the coast of Brazil, the markets or urban sprawl of Sao Paolo and the afternoon lecture halls of the French natural history museum. The Brazilian New World of the 1930s is populated by Lebanese merchants, Japanese farmers and an occasional French frontiersman. While our resident alien describes his house in Sao Paolo and writes affectionately of his students, the Brazil of Tristes Tropiques is remarkably devoid of everyday Brazilians or visions of the dominant Euro-Portuguese culture. Lévi-Strauss went to Brazil to see the meeting of the Old and New World. That original fifteenth century moment is an idée fixe around which his senses and intellectual gymnastics dance like a moth around a candle flame. In the third act of his book, he states it this way: Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction; and secondly, that there will never be another New World: since the confrontation between the Old World and the New makes us thus conscious of ourselves, let us at least express it in its primary terms – in the place where, and by referring back to a time when, our

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world missed the opportunity offered to it of choosing between its various missions. (TT/JDW, 393). What has happened in the intervening centuries is sad to contemplate, and seems to be the result of having chosen the wrong response to this confrontation. We might have chosen, five hundred years ago, to learn from the New World rather than to displace it. This realization generates a sadness that he skillfully builds in the reader’s mind. He leaves Europe slowly and elliptically by boat several times, ending with his account of the ‘last’ journey of 1941. Fleeing a defeated France, he was an anthropologist on the run, transformed into an enemy of the state by a Jewish name, received as a traitor by the marginal authorities in the colonial French administration in the Caribbean. How blind and petty, how threatening civilization had become, and at the same time how powerless the authorities were to mask its decay. He recounts his trouble with Brazilian police who detain him for photographing the black children who follow him on the street. It was a time when it was against the law to publish images of Brazilians descended from African slaves. Our narrator moves through the jungle at night, along roads visible only to the animal he rides. He senses that he is approaching a settlement by the sound of dogs barking, and he is sheltered by an exploitation of natural resources – gold mining, rubber tapping – that has drawn a desperate human population into the jungle and then collapsed around them, leaving fragments of human poverty in its wake. Back in the second act, in this theater of observation focused on the margins of cultural dispersal, the author describes four native cultures in the Mato Grosso plateau. In a series of scientific excursions, he visits these groups, each living in a fashion that is progressively closer to a ‘natural’ state, the state he imagines existed before European contact. The anthropologist revels in these social agreements that, despite centuries of co-existence, maintain their non-European authenticity. The book starts over again – the narrator is human, his subjects are human, and he identifies with his subjects. We, of course, are reassured that we are the humans who read books in order to understand how humans live. With small elements of material culture arrayed before him, Lévi-Strauss miraculously creates a portrait of the human mind. He creates a rather seamless transition from his personal rumination of surviving the onslaught and hazards of a high-class French education to discussing the elaborate tattoo patterns practiced by the Caduveo. He reproduces these images drawn on paper, and photographs of the same Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

patterns drawn as they are meant to be, on women’s faces. He reproduces photographs, several of them remarkable for the spontaneity they capture, of the people he lived with. These human beings are naked by the author’s standards, and so their cultural clothing – necklace, arm band, belt, penis sheath – are all the more visible. They are playful and at ease with each other. A young woman reclines in the dust with the expression of a daydream on her face. In a photo captioned “The author’s best informant, in ceremonial dress”, the subject fixes the photographer with a stare of serious dignity. We are given a brief biography of this nameless man. This man, who was about thirty-five years old, spoke Portuguese fairly well. He said that he had once been able to read and write the language (although he could no longer do so), having been a pupil at the mission. The Fathers, proud of their success, had sent him to Rome, where he had been received by the Holy Father. On his return, there had been an attempt to make him go through a Christian marriage ceremony, without regard for the traditional native rules. This had brought on a spiritual crisis during which he was re-converted to the old Bororo ideal: he then settled in Kejara where, for the last ten or fifteen years, he had been living an exemplary savage life. This papal Indian, who was now stark naked, befeathered, smeared

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with red paint and wearing the pin and the lip-plug in his nose and lower lip, was to prove a wonderful guide to Bororo sociology. (TT/JDW, 216-217) The author convinces us that these humans know something of a world that is a whole system, internalized in patterns of thought that are externalized in the visual messages of patterns reproduced across generations, material objects crafted and displayed, each encoded in a system he would like to learn. And as the groups become smaller, poorer, and more precarious in their relationship to both nature and the dominant civilization, the question of identifying the code becomes more fascinating. The journey into the wilderness of 1938 ends in the EuroBrazilian frontier where the boom and bust of global rubber business has left the latex sap gatherers in desperate economic condition. The “wild” hunters and gatherers he has visited are a well-balanced culture compared to these workers whose efforts cannot pay for their own supplies. The encounter of the Old and the New World seems to be destroying both. The author chooses to end with a description of a country dance where the local women presented themselves to the male latex tappers. He describes the couple’s dance steps from “another age” as well as their recital of rhymed couplets improvised between steps. Then one can almost see him turn to the audience, like the narrator of a play, and directly address the twentieth century French audience he has been entertaining with his stories of time spent in the jungle. The Nambikwara had taken me back to the Stone Age and the Tupi-Kawahib to the sixteenth century; here I felt I was in the eighteenth century, as one imagines it must have been in the little West Indian ports or along the coast. I had crossed a continent. But the rapidly approaching end of my journey was being brought home to me in the first place by this ascent through layers of time. (TT/JDW, 372) The second act is over and it is time to return to a world he had left at the beginning of the first act, a Europe about to be devastated by the Second World War. In The Beginning Lévi-Strauss begins the third act of Tristes Tropiques with a recollection of boredom: wandering across the arid Brazilian wilderness with no natives in sight. He confesses how his escape from the normal European world left him with “fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced…” And rather than thinking about the mythological puzzles of Brazilian Indians or shamanistic chants, his head was filled with “the melody of Chopin’s Etude no. 3, opus 10, which, by a bitterly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to epitomize all I had left behind.” In a foreshadowing of the ahistorical conclusion he creates for his book, he describes the irony of Chopin rising up in his brain. Before he left France, his musical taste had become more modern – Debussy and Stravinsky are mentioned – but now this nineteenth century melody was all the more interesting because he knew what came after it, and could hear in his head the future and the past. At which point he recounts how he did what many European writers, artists and composers were doing in the 1930s: try to resolve the present by invoking the pre-Christian era of Roman classicism. He spends his days flipping over his ethnography notes and writing a play about Cinna confronting the Emperor Augustus on the blank parts of the paper. He tells us this attempt at sense-making through literature was a failure – he does not complete the play – but his synopsis of the incomplete text begins a series of meditations about returning to Europe. He writes about his failure to write and the impossible nature of anthropology. He remembers appreciating the taste of the rum made in the old style in French Martinique, rather than the modern industrial rum produced in US Puerto Rico. But what he is thinking about is his own transformation from a politically engaged Socialist, a role he played before going to Brazil, into a scientist engaged in analyzing but not modifying society. Above and beyond all the exquisite logic of his argument, it is metaphor that carries his ideas. It is the imperfection of the barrel aging in Martinique that creates its superior taste. “No society is perfect” he asserts, and it is imperfection that is fundamental to the nature of societies. From that metaphor, he develops one of those binary classifications that were to become the signature of his later books. There are two kinds of societies: those that practice cannibalism and those that put people in prisons. The adherents of either one of these practices can see clearly that the adherents of the other are beyond the boundaries of civilization. Then he is talking about what it means to become an anthropologist, a distinctly Western European invention. Perhaps it is not the greatness of understanding that allows us to rise above our superior civilization and compare it to others, he suggests. The dialectic opposite is the thought that Europe produces anthropologists “precisely because

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it is a prey to strong feelings of remorse, which forced it compare its image with those of different societies in the hope that they would show the same defects or would help to explain how its own defects had developed within it.â&#x20AC;? (TT/ JDW, 389) And the burning flame of that remorse is located in that time when the Old World discovered the New World and chose not to learn from it, but to displace it. It is in this thought that the true sadness resides. The finale of the book is a play set in India. A French intellectual, an anthropologist, uses the relics he sees in museums and archeological sites to explain the state of Western Europe. Everywhere he looks, he sees the lost union of West and East, the ancient Graeco-Buddhist world that could have been. At Taxila he begins a meditation on the layers of history beneath his feet. Like Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, this is a site where the relics an ancient cultural plurality contrasts harshly with what was, in 1950, the emerging reality of the post-colonial Hindu and Moslem states. He uses the occasion to question whether Christianity, which absorbed the Graeco-Roman world, and Islam, which displaced Buddhism, should ever have come into existence. [W]e would be underestimating Taxila if we thought of it only as the place where, for several centuries, three of the greatest spiritual traditions of the Ancient World, Hellenism, Hinduism and Buddhism, lived side by side. The Persia of Zoroaster was also present and, with the Parthians and Scythians, the civilizations of the steppes, which here combined with Greek inspiration to create the most beautiful ornaments ever to come from the hands of a jeweler; and these memories had not yet been forgotten when Islam invaded the country, never to leave it again. With the exception of Christianity, all the influences which molded the Old World come together here. â&#x20AC;Ś What would the West be like today, if the attempt to unite the Mediterranean world and India had any lasting success? Would Christianity or Islam have come into being? (TT/JDW, 396) If this heresy had been written fifty years later, it might have generated death threats for the author. But as completely as he eviscerates the value of Islamic civilization, he quickly confesses that he is not really talking about Islam. He is talking about the West. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I rediscovered in Islam the world I myself had come from; Islam is the West of the East. Or, to be more precise, I had to have experience of Islam in order to appreciate the danger which today threatens French Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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thought.” (TT/JDW, 405) This is the danger of a world that believes only in its own formal logic without recognizing that “the universe is no longer made up of the entities about which we are talking.” (TT/JDW, 405) He is condemning the tendency towards intolerance present in Islam. He could be condemning Christian fundamentalism and we can remember the sympathy he expressed for the Brazilian Indians who murdered their intolerant Protestant missionaries in the second act. His meditation on the cultures of the Old World never mentions Judaism and does not explore the varieties of Christian or Islamic thought. He speaks of Christian, Moslem and Buddhist civilizations as if they were a set of structural relationships. If the West traces its internal tensions back to their source, it will see that Islam, by coming between Buddhism and Christianity, Islamized us at the time when the West, by taking part in the crusades, was involved in opposing it and therefore came to resemble it, instead of undergoing – had Islam never come into being – a slow process of osmosis with Buddhism, which would have Christianized us still further, and would have made us all the more Christian in that we would have gone back beyond Christianity itself. It was then that the West lost the opportunity of remaining female. (TT/JDW, 409) He is writing about India, but he is talking about the failure of the West. His arguments are both historical and ahistorical. If Islam had not come into being, if the Spanish had not expelled it and then destroyed the Aztec and Inca states, if the Portuguese had not decimated the native of Brazil, the world would be a different place. In much the same way he found the easy social balance of the Bororo men’s house to be an antidote for his uninspiring spiritual past in act two, in the conclusion of act three Levi-Strauss finds a profound solace in the Buddhism he observes in a Mogh village in what is today the BangladeshBurmese border. As the book ends, he is scrambling up a muddy hill to enter a modest community monastery. In sharp contrast to his description of other forms of contemporary religion, Lévi-Strauss finds beauty, humanity and profound logic in the village temple he has been invited to enter. ’You need not do what I am doing’ my companion said to me as he prostrated himself on the ground four times before the altar, and I followed his advice. However, I

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did so less through self-consciousness than discretion: he knew that I did not share his beliefs, and I would have been afraid of debasing the ritual gestures by letting him think I considered them as mere conventions: but, for once, I would have felt no embarrassment in performing them. Between this form of religion and myself, there was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front of idols or adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society which created his legend, had evolved twenty-five centuries before and to which my civilization could contribute only by confirming it. (TT/JDW, 411) We can use one of Lévi-Strauss’ own tropes to appreciate this ahistorical moment, since the twenty-first century reader can see both the past and the future in this event. The social scientist that will spend the rest of his life formulating the structural relationships of human thought and live to see his hundredth birthday finds authenticity in acknowledging the wisdom of an ancient sage in this modest Buddhist house of worship. What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree? Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object, of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began. It is 2,500 years since men first discovered and formulated these truths. In the interval, we have found nothing new, except – as we have tried in turn all possible ways out of the dilemma – so many additional proofs of the conclusion that we would have liked to avoid. (TT/JDW, 411) This is the message the author brings back from his travels. He has gone searching for the New World and found ahistorical relativism. As he moves about within his mental and historical Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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framework, man takes along with him all the positions he has already occupied, and all those he will occupy. He is everywhere at one and the same time; he is a crowd surging forward abreast, and constantly recapitulating the whole series of previous stages. For we live in several worlds, each truer than the one it encloses, and itself false in relation to the one which encompasses it. Some are known to us through action; some are lived through in thought; but the seeming contradiction resulting from their coexistence is solved in the obligation we feel to grant a meaning to the nearest and to deny any to those furthest away; whereas the truth lies in a progressive dilating of the meaning, but in reverse order, up to the point at which it explodes. (TT/JDW, 412) Writing of this conclusion in Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction a decade after the book appeared, Octavio Paz describes how the writer’s thought “achieved in those few pages a density and transparency which might make us think of the forms rock crystal takes if it were not for the fact that it is animated by a pulsation which does not recall so much mineral immobility as the vibration of light waves.”(CLSI, 135) When I read it as a student, I thought he had converted to Buddhism and would write his next book from a monastery. As I read it today, he sounds less like a Buddhist and more like the analytical double of Walt Whitman trading his naïve optimism for a love of the Void. The final sentences of the book end with images meant to embody constructed meaning: the beauty we sense in our visual perception of a mineral, our olfactory perception of a flower, the mental projection we make when exchanging visual contact with another animal. But rather than these images, I found two sentences a few paragraphs before to be the best conclusion to the book. It made me think of Stephan Daedelus on the beach, closing his eyes and wondering if the world will still be there when he opens them again. The world began without man and will end without him. The institutions, morals and customs that I shall have spent my life noting down and trying to understand are the transient efflorescence of a creation in relation to which they have no meaning, except perhaps that of allowing mankind to play its part in creation. (TT/JDW, 413)

Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, by Octavio Paz, translated from the Spanish [Claude Lévi-Strauss o el Nuevo festín de Esopo, 1967] by J.S. Bernstein and Maxine Bernstein. Dell, 1970 (CLSI )

A Visit to the Musée du Quai Branly In the centuries when Western Europeans first set out in

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ships to Africa, Asia and the Americas, they began to create places to display the things they brought back, the cabinet of curiosity, where the exotic objects from around the world – animal, vegetable and mineral, produced by nature or foreign cultures – to demonstrate a grasp of the world. This became the natural history museum, where objects from the environments of the world were presented in a classified organization, along with the artifacts of distant human cultures. This branched into the anthropology museum where the evolution of man was recorded and pre-history was joined to the activities of modern anthropology. In parallel, the objects collected by explorers, colonists, and commercial traders from around the world became the collections of our museums of foreign cultures. As the twenty-first century began, the French government created the Musée du Quai Branly by selectively absorbing the highlights of French ethnography collections into what its creators proposed would be a new kind of museum. The result is different from previous anthropology museums, but it is not new. It is a French art museum, in much the same way that the Musée Guimet, the national collection of art from Asia, is a French art museum. The building, designed by Jean Nouvel, resembles a set of interlocking cubes, colorful and opaque, hoisted on legs standing over a grassy marsh. The garden looks even better at night when plastic sticks glow among the marsh grass and throw colorful patterns onto the belly of museum beast above. When I approach it from the street or walk beneath it, I often think of the drawings of the Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki. His castles fly through the air held up by airships, or stand up on steam-powered legs and walk across the landscape. I imagine this monstrosity slowly walking over to the quai, lowering itself into the Seine and drifting out to sea, where it would continue to drift around the planet, returning its contents to their native lands, leaving one of its cube at each place it touches land. The objects in the Quai Branly were collected by adventurers, soldiers, administrators, scientists, missionaries and art dealers. Regardless of their provenance or original purpose, each object is presented as “non-Western art”. It is here that Lévi-Strauss’ 100th birthday was celebrated. It is here that his name and words have become part of the permanent exhibition. Having missed the celebration, I went looking for what remained. I enter the building by walking up a ramp that pierces the cubes near its center. At this juncture, the permanent exhibition area opens into view and I am standing at the beginning and the end of the path that leads in a Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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circle organized by geographic zones. If I turn to the right, as an arrow on the floor suggests, I will enter Oceania and continue to Australasia, Asia, and Africa. But I want to see the Americas and they are right in front of me. I have been here before, but this time I look at the orientation guide and realize that I have been looking at the museum in reverse order. The Americas, where I always start, is the end of the collection. The visitor who continues straight ahead when passing through the transition from the World of Us to the World of Not Us encounters the art of an America that Levi-Strauss unified in his imagination. There is no North, Central and South. There is no high and low culture, no empires, no rise and fall. Mexico is with Brazil, Peru is with the Northern Plains, the Eastern Woodlands are beside the Andes. The objects in the cases are organized in visual pattern groups. Each object is placed and aligned to emphasize pattern similarities or variations. Symmetry is emphasized by the way each statue, vase, pipe, axe and pedestal is presented. Along the edge of one case, a video screen presents a series of photos of stone and ceramic objects which transform into each other through the aid of computer morphing. The text by anthropologist Emmanuel Désveaux explains: “They make transformational groups, tokens of the uniqueness of Amerindian artifacts: even before being instruments in themselves, they are regarded as instruments of meaning.” The largest of the glass cases at the end/beginning of the collection contains a group of head ornaments on stands. The label is a Lévi-Straussian transformation: “From Crown to Halo”. The label reads, in part, “The famous headdress of the Plains Indians is a fine example of the synthesis between the crown and the halo.” The halo of feathers beside it has the label “Diadème d’enfant, Bororo, don Claude et Dina Lévi-Strauss (Mission ethnographique au Brasil, 1935-36).” Beside this is a panel that presents the Bororo birdnester myth, the text that Lévi-Strauss chose as the key myth in his four-volume Mythologies. It is a story of incest, quest, and transformation. Nearby cases present sets of paddles, clubs and rattles with a text explaining their common properties – supporting contact across distance – also explained by the birdnester myth. Yet some geographical and cultural boundaries are maintained. As I continue backwards from the end, I reach a case containing only objects collected by Lévi-Strauss in Brazil: small ornaments and objects made from shell, sticks, animal teeth and gourds. And turning the corner, I am facing two early nineteenth century oil portraits by George Catlin of Plains Indian dignitaries. These men are dressed

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Portrait of the Indian chief, "Maungua-daus" (Great Hero). A work commissioned by the king LouisPhilippe following a performance of dances by the Indian troupe of George Catlin at the Louvre in 1845, Paris musée de l'Homme

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Claude et Dina LĂŠvi-Strauss in Brasil, 1935

in buffalo robes or deerskin shirts, with feather roaches and headdresses covering their heads. Their necks and breasts are draped with claw necklaces, beads and shell or metal gorgets. I have crossed from South to North America. But the Frenchman has made his point. After looking at the necklace collected from the Brazilian natives who slept on the ground and dressed only with penis sheaths, I am seeing America differently. I have seen Catlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings a hundred times, in books and on the walls of other museums. But now for the first time, I can see this necklace made from the enormous claws of a grizzly bear almost lost in the layers of robes, beads, gorgets, medals and face paint. It is a hundred years, several language groups and thousands of miles away from the tiny delicate teeth of the necklace I have just left around the corner. I can see it is the same human mind that fashioned them both, that chose this material and this form to adorn the neck. And it is the same human mind looking through my eyes at these ornaments and paintings, rattles and clubs, and finding them beautiful. Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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Franco Beltrametti, Philip Whalen and James Koller, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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What Tesla Taught Coleridge: Learning from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

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The Book as an Object The reader expects a Selected Poems to be highlights, the best, the most significant, representative, the ones you should read. Collected poems are a different animal. They are someone’s version of everything. At best it is an act of collaboration between the poet, who decided what writing constitutes a poem worth collecting, and the editor, who edits and finds a place for it all. Michael Rothenberg’s organization of The Collected is based on a rather straightforward approach: chronology. Whalen’s poems all end with a date, or a date range. His poems are collected into a linear sequence organized by date, either when the composition began or was completed. To some degree, chronology was the poet’s idea: he made it a practice to put dates at the end of each poem. Books are a mechanism for reproducing and communicating writing. As objects, they have their history – a few thousand years of codex production, five hundred years of mechanical printing. They have their contemporary infrastructure – book agents, publishers, book jobbers, editors, publicists, distributors, booksellers, book reviewers – and their consumers – readers, collectors, librarians. I like The Collected Poems as a book-object. It has its affordances. Being a large book (about 900 pages) with a hard cover and perfect sewn binding, I can put it down on a flat surface – a table, a desk, a divan – and it stays open. This feature has two advantages. The reader can put the book down, open to a poem and not lose the place as the book snaps shut. It also makes it easy to open the book at random and start reading from anywhere. On the negative side, I am not too fond of the typography choices. Someone has chosen a light san serif typeface in all caps for the poem titles. This makes the titles lighter than the texts themselves, which offends my sense of hierarchy. As the poet often uses lines entirely in capital letters within his poems, this choice by the book designer makes it unnecessarily difficult to spot the title (=beginning) of a poem when flipping through the book.

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The editor has chosen to reproduce most of Whalen’s poems as they were published in his lifetime, as typeset text. A few poems are reproduced as hand-lettering by the poet. Whalen was a serious calligrapher. He wrote his poems with ink on paper using a formal humanist script that often included flourishes, elegant curves and expressive extensions of letters, as well as drawings (animals, figures, plants) related to the text. The Collected includes the calligraphic version of one long poem, “Monday in the Evening”, reproduced from the original book-object designed and published by Ettore Sottsass, the great Italian designer and architect. I have a copy of this book object, purchased from the Phoenix Bookshop in New York some years ago, and it is a wonderful thing to read and hold. I suggest the reader go to a nearby university library with a good poetry collection and find it. The Form of a Philip Whalen Poem For those who were reading modern American poetry in the college classrooms of the 1960s – Robert Frost or Hart Crane or Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams – the form of a Philip Whalen poem was a revelation. When you saw it on the page you had to see that this was a different kind of verse. Its shape did not appear to be regular lines separated into regular stanzas. It resembled a stream of thoughts – “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines” as Whalen was to describe it in the preface to his book Everyday (reproduced in an appendix of essays and prefaces, p.835) – stimulated by observation colliding with memory interrupted by conversation, directed by impulse attraction, shifting to judgment, describing a selected detail, responding to a sound. Whalen was a Romantic poet in a scientific age, as much a child of the Enlightenment as a new voice of post-war America. He proudly insisted he did not believe in the reality of the material world. His writing was a square peg that did not fit in the round hole drilled into our mind where poetry was supposed to fit. First impressions are important when discovering a new writer, and my first impression of Whalen was based on two events. I am an East Coast person, more than a generation younger than Whalen. When I left home in the autumn of 1967 to enter college, I heard a fellow student perform one of Whalen’s poems at a reading: F Train Absolutely stoned Rocking bug-eyed billboard WAFF! No more bridge than Adam’s

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off ox Pouring over 16 2/3ds MPH sodiumVapor light yellow light LOVE YOU!

(Big High Song for Somebody, p.47) You didn’t have to see that on the page to hear how it danced, jumped back and forth between sensation and music. You didn’t have to know the pre-BART San FranciscoBerkeley train system to feel the ride. Then, a short time later, with the name Whalen jammed into that round lookfor-this-poet hole in my head, I found the pamphlet/broadside edition of “Self-Portrait, From Another Direction” in a bookshop run by someone who had recently returned from San Francisco. The plain brown cover opened to reveal a long page that folded down revealing a rush of words as wide as the paper would allow, spilling down and, flipping the paper over, up the other side. The reproduction in The Collected (or in several other books – Memoirs of an Interglacial Age, On Bear’s Head, Overtime) is not so wide, the side-titles reminiscent of plot summaries in an 18th or 19th century novel don’t have as much white space, but the language of the poem flows between the banks of the page margins as best it can. Here are two passages THOUGHT IS NOT SWIFT! perhaps the mind is slower than this pencil, its rate of motion nearer that of the heartbeat – moving slower than the head which turns not as quick as a wink Pieces broken off a sandstone cliff Grass and salal bushes still growing out of it, roots exposed I said a new landslide; the Judge: “It fell off two years ago” … Any word you see here defies all fear doubt destruction ignorance & hatefulness All the impossibilities unfavorable chance or luck It will have overcome all my strength (the total power of a raging maniac self-hypnotized berserk missing one arm part of the entrails exposed

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running with incredible speed Superhuman force) an exorbitance – slingstone hurled at a tangent to the circle in which it lately whirled zipping off in high-speed parabola Into the mirror ( NOW showing many men ) all of them “I” (p.124-127)

This self-portrait is a kind of essay. It proudly includes everything (so it seems, except for “2 lines canceled”), and walks along gathering flowers, arranging them, pulling books from a shelf and phrases from conversations, recording a dynamic, a motion happening at a particular time. In the first passage quoted above, we hear the poet thinking about thought, moving from an idea to a physical sensation to a language phrase (quick as a wink). Then a looking out and the sense of time (it fell off two years ago). It snaps together. In the finale, the poet invokes demonic powers, now a mind movie made of any words you see here, joined by a music that shifts and builds to exorbitance (look it up!) that smashes into a mirror. These early poems written in the 1950s, which first reached a large audience in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, stood out from the rest. Whalen has a unique language. His poems alternate between being erudite, goofy, elegant and vulgar, and often embracing them all. This style was an invitation to readers to see through the pretense of judgment; to experience what was happening NOW. The reader had to pause, re-read, hear each shift, re-assemble the sensations and ideas and actively make sense of the poem. This combination of diction is profoundly irregular in the longer poems and makes them difficult to follow. But these long poems – including “Sourdough Mountain Lookout”, “Monday In The Evening”, “The Best of It”, “Birthday Poem” and “Scenes of Life at the Capital” – are the diamond mines of Whalen’s writing. They create a non-narrative space in which realizations flash by like shooting stars. It is easier to absorb his style in the shorter poems, closer to lyrics than essays, where a group of lines will stick in memory. These lines come from the 1950s: I shall be myself— Free, a genius, an embarrassment Like the Indian, the buffalo Like Yellowstone National Park. (Further Notice, p.64)

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& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars Happy to have saved us all (Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis, p.106)

And flipping through the book to the late 1970s, a single poem will be both concise and accessible enough to grasp in one glance, like this one. Whether we intended it or like it or wanted it We are part of a circle that stands beyond life and death Happening whether we will or no We canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t break it, we are seldom aware of it And it looks clearest to people beyond its edge. They are included in it Whether or not they know. (How Many Is Real, p. 752)

This last poem, quoted in its entirety, is a lecture, a dharma talk (Zen Buddhist sermon) and a visionary pronouncement, as well as a complex musical machine. Philip Whalen spent a great deal of his life thinking about time, history and the way the mind works. His poetry is devoted to an impulse to understand the human condition as broadly as possible. His writing records a lifetime of pushing himself beyond the intellectual conventions of Euro-American-Christian thought, searching through the pre-Roman pre-Christian Mediterranean sources (primarily Greek), into Vedic texts, up the trail of Mahayana Buddhist sutras and iconography that led to Tang-Song Chinese authors, on to Japanese flower arrangements, and Zen Buddhist outfits practicing in American robes. Combined with all this is a deep vein of 18th century English elegance and Romanticism, fired by an impulse and drive to understand thought, spirit, emotion, and imagination. There are many references to William Blake, chronologically the last Englishman Whalen seemed to have believed in. Blakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appearance in this poem is typical. Blake tried to start all over again, good news, a new dispensation, The churchmen and philosophers alternately using glue and string, Some tried to break the bone and re-set it, like a surgeon Nobody can pry the western mind loose from those nails, that perfumed grave, the weeping Momma (The Greeks, p. 472)

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Reading The Collected, it seems that Blake, that Romantic who lived longest and engraved his visions with acid, is the secret hero of much of Whalen’s writing. Like that hero, Whalen was striving to start over, rejecting not early industrial England but mid-20th century America, a land ruled by “boobies”, awash in materialism, entangled in senseless foreign wars. While his close friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder engaged in their own individual ways in social and political struggles, Whalen remained actively somewhere else. He titled one early poem “20:vii:58, On Which I Renounce the Notion of Social Responsibility”. And that poem ends: Motion of shadows where there’s neither light nor eye to see Mind a revolving door My head a falling star (p. 103)

In their own unique way, Whalen’s poems are full of protest, challenging the reader to reconsider the past, and imagine not a better future but a better present. His poems do this by often focusing on a single complex problem: how can a person understand reality? Reading “The Education Continues Along” What can you learn by reading The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen? The possibilities are various, as Robert Creeley used to say. No one can go very far speaking in generalities about this body of work. The general – style, subject, tone, theme – was not really what Whalen was about. He was about the particular moment, the specific sound, the intricate detail manifest in a thought. Read a poem with me and I will show you what I experience when I read this man’s work. I first read “The Education Continues Along” when it was published in On Bear’s Head, the large collection of Whalen’s poetry that appeared in 1969. That book included everything Whalen had published in books and “books” that hadn't been published at all. The poem was in an unpublisehd book called “Vanilla, poems 1965-66”. Some time later I found the poem’s first appearance reproduced in the poet's calligraphy in “The Philip Whalen issue” of the magazine Intransit (1967). It was a great pleasure to meet the poem again in The Collected. The date at the end of the poem tells us that Whalen started writing “The Education Continues Along” on July 27, 1965 in San Francisco. He was in conversation with a younger poet, Clark Coolidge, to whom the poem is dedicated. In the spring of 1966 he moved to Kyoto, Japan

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and completed the poem that summer. In the purely chronological world of The Collected, “The Education Continues Along” begins on p. 457 and concludes on p. 468, sliding in between short poems written a few days before or a few days after it began. When I first encountered it, I thought it was one of the best poems I’d ever read. Here was a poem about magic, vision, atomic structure, memory, the quest for knowledge. It was funny, challenging, and educational. It was also rather obscure, containing references to writers, philosophers, musicians, scientists and artists the poet is actively pulling together from memory of reading, books on the shelves of his apartment, and trips to the San Francisco Public Library. I began to re-read it in the big lovely Collected Poems book-object. It begins with an incantation and instruction: Don’t leave the house before noon there’s a reason You’ll find it later it will be revealed to you Preserve ritual purity The Unworthy must be left in that Ignorance which is a Divine Punishment Amen.

Of course, the poet (and the reader following along in the poem) would like to be Worthy and overcome Ignorance, and we look forward to the promise of something to be revealed. Encountering the poem now, I can read The Collected and the Internet, itself a continuous transformation of what millions of minds imagine does or could exist. These things I see appearing on the printed page and in “windows” on my screen are the result of an intersection of visionary quest, commercial greed, scholarly collaboration, scientific method and computer engineering. The Internet, the World Wide Web, digital libraries and hypertext are nowhere mentioned in Philip Whalen’s poetry. By the time Whalen could have used a computer in a similar way, perhaps in the late 1990s, his eye sight had become so poor that he could no longer read. It is a complete anachronism to apply the Web to an interpretation of this poem written in 1965. But in a profound way the seed of this approach is found in the text itself, in the magic word Xanadu. Following the invocation, the poet careens off in a series of association flashes on minerals, perhaps objects resting on the writer’s desk. I don’t know much about minerals. When I search for “rutile” I find it is a natural form of titanium dioxide. For “SAGENITE?” I find in the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica that sagenite is a form of rutile:

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used as an ornamental stone since ancient times and was particularly prized in England and France during the 18th century. Intergrown netlike or reticulated aggregates of rutile in quartz are called sagenite (from the Greek word for “net”).

Whalen gives us a phrase and definition: watch and pray. “Watch” means “to sit up all night without sleeping.” Watch means look at me: See my bellybutton.

This is followed by stanzas beginning with capitalized words, each of which are centered and executed with a special decoration or flourish in the calligraphic version (a feature of Whalen’s poetry not well suited to the affordances of moveable type used in The Collected): LIMIT defined by change of state … MEASURE, that which contains a number of beats. … THE PRIMARY: are you in love?

A few lines later the poet presents the sounds of sub-atomic particles: “peh!” for a π-meson, “*---------meh!--------*” for μ-meson, and “---------*bah!*---------” for a β-particle. The quotations, dashes and asterisks don’t convey the sound as well as Whalen’s pen.

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The atomic building blocks of material reality are decaying, a timely reference from the period of American history when nuclear warfare was immanent and new elements were being fabricated at nearby Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Each sound-idea gives off its own string of association, leading to Yeats’ oft-quoted line from “The Second Coming”. Mr. Yeats has warned us, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” Quite as if we were able to learn anything, as if we’ve listened to Wm. Yeats – or to Plato, Jesus, Moses & Co. – Nothing has soaked into our heads except some fake superstitions about sex and a few jokes and limericks concerned with the same subject.

The poet is searching for the root of knowing. Is it memory? Is it reading books? How badly do I need to read one more book, whatever its price considering that I’m already half blind from too much reading anyway and one more book has as many lies in it as all the rest, why don’t I look at the world instead or sit and think for a few years, or even try to write “seriously”

This imagination of the end brings up images of time as a cycle and eternal return. Which in turn leads to associations of “FINAL FAREWELL / PERFORMANCE”. The poet recalls famous musicians, actresses, dancers, and comedians who make repeating their final performance “an independent art form: “FOR THE LAST TIME ON ANY STAGE!” At which point the poem (and the poet) returns to the business at hand. ABSOLUTE REALITY, namely: how much can I do right now about life in this place? I am it, all of this living AND this place and what I’m doing is called T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

The reader is reminded that the poem is about magic, changes that happen out of time, beyond material logic. There appear to be numerous conversations going on, natural speech the poet hears, people questioning inside and outside his head. Another modern writer appears: * G. Stein: “History is what happens from time to time.” *

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I quote Whalen’s use of the centered asterisk here to point out one of the visual devices he used in this and in many of his poems. The asterisk is a pause, a note for the rest we hear in music as a contrast to sound. Whalen did not divide his long poems into movements, but I can sense a division here, composed of so many voices, verse, prose, quotations and associations, as in a piece of music, ending with this statement by Gertrude Stein set off by the points of silence. The second movement begins with the poet speaking to the reader. He places himself in a room with an open window, a joss-stick burning before a bronze statue of Tara, the female Buddha. The poet demonstrates how he is getting organized. He makes a list. In the center of the list (3 of 5) is a question about Nicola Tesla. 3) Did Nicola Tesla REALLY make a machine that could extract electrical voltage out of the very ground on which he stood. (Clark Coolidge asked me.) I can’t remember what are the characteristics of or use for the electrical coil which bears his name. Tesla.

So now we have a task before us, something to educate ourselves about, though for the poet it is still a struggle with memory. I suppose that light still flashes above Miner’s [minor’s] Ledge.

At which point he quotes a mnemonic stuck in his brain “1-4-3,” “I-love-you, I hear you. 1-4-3. Miner’s Ledge Light, 1-4-3-I-love-you, what better way to remember?

I have no idea what Whalen was remembering here. I guessed it was a semaphore code flashed between fire lookouts – I knew that Whalen had spent a summer working for the forestry service in Oregon – but I was wrong. As I flipped through The Collected, it fell open to a passage in the longest of Whalen’s poems, “Scenes of Life at the Capital”. I’ve read this before, but I never made the connection between these lines and this passage written the following year in which the poet is remembering scenes from the Vancouver Poetry Conference, an event that took place in 1963. He is remembering Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg: Straightening out something complicated, Olson sighing the while, “I hear you. One, four, three. I hear you. One, four three. Minot’s Ledge Light. One, four, three. I LOVE YOU. One, four three, Minot’s

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Ledge Light. You remember, don’t you Bob. One, four, three I LOVE YOU—what better way to remember?” (p.624)

Minot’s (sounds like Miner’s or minor’s) Ledge Light is a lighthouse marking a rock ledge south of Boston, Massachusetts. Whalen is remembering the voice of a third poet, Charles Olson. What he was talking about is right here: In 1894, Minot's was given a rotating second-order Fresnel lens and a distinctive characteristic 1-4-3 flash. Someone decided that 1-4-3 stood for "I love you," so Minot's got the nickname of the "I Love You Light." (Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse History, http://lighthouse. cc/minots/history.html) The poet’s mind is grasping at sounds and shapes. This quickly leads to another fragment of memory that sets a theme for the next movement of the poem. “So & So” (some historical figure, some artist) “grabbed up all these” (musical notes, words, whatever) “and made not another” (whatever it was) “but… a STAR!” Where’d I read that?

The remainder of the poem goes on to solve these two puzzles, weaving a net of connections between disparate points of art and imagination. A voice speaks, offering to “recite the history / of The Invisible City of Kitezh!” This reference puzzled me over the years, because I never had the curiosity to solve it. But today I typed “city of kitezh” and found: Skazanie o Nevidimom Grade Kitezhe i Deve Fevronii (The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia) While singing the praises of Nature in a forest near Little Kitezh, the maiden Fevronia is surprised by a stranger, who is captivated by her beauty and obtains her consent to marry him. On his departure, she learns that he is the son of the Prince of Kitezh. The city is attacked by Tatars, who have been guided thence by Grishka Kuterma, a drunken reprobate. Fevronia is seized and carried off, praying that Kitezh may be saved. Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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When the Tatars press their attack the City is rendered invisible, and its reflection is seen on the surface of the Lake. Fevronia escapes and, together with the now repentant Kuterma, enters the forest. Here she is visited by birds of Paradise, and the spirit of her betrothed, who has been killed. Having eaten of the bread that brings eternal happiness, Fevronia departs with the spirit. Kitezh is restored to its transfigured People. (http://opera.stanford.edu/RimskyKorsakov/Kitezh/ synopsis.html) The poet was listening to an opera by Rimsky Korsakov, the subject of which is yet another magical transformation. Whalen was a serious musician, capable of playing Bach when he could put his hands on a piano or organ. And the “Mongol Horde” mentioned a few lines later were the cousins or uncles of Kubla Khan (the historical Kublai Khan), an association that does not appear for several stanzas. Instead, the poem hits an assertion: The XIX C. was black and white.

This leads to thoughts of early 20th century German artists – merz collages by Kurt Schwitters, “Die Grossen Blauen Pferde” by Franz Marc, “Fish Garden” by Paul Klee – each of which created new ways of seeing. The poet is reassessing various figures from the previous hundred years. But at the same time, he is on the memory trail of the quotation. He finds the memory and its source enters the poem. “Give Coleridge one vivid word from an old narrative: let him mix it with two in his thought; and then (translating terms of music into terms of words) ‘out of these sounds he (will) frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.” – The Road to Xanadu, p.303

Whalen explains the trail here quite deliberately. He had been reading A Poet’s Notebook by Edith Sitwell, and she had quoted this passage from a book by John Livingstone Lowes about the sources of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most well-known poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”. The quotation from Lowes, remembered from reading in Sitwell, makes reference to a line in the poem “Abt Vogler” by Robert Browning. I remember taking The Road to Xanadu out of the library once many years ago, but I no longer have a research library to go to. I looked up Lowes and found that he was an English professor at Harvard whose lectures on Coleridge became his

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most well-remembered book, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927). So I turned to bookfinder.com, a network of booksellers on the Internet where I have managed to locate books for sale in stores in Australia, Austria, Ontario, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wales. I found that The Road to Xanadu has been through many editions, including several paperback printings. The most expensive, at $150.00, was a first edition, signed by the author, from Black Oak Books in Berkeley (probably not the edition that Whalen used). I was able to order a copy of the 1959 paperback from a bookshop in London for £8.29 including shipping. When the book arrived a few days later with a splendid X cover design by Paul Rand, I re-read much of it. Lowes was an unqualified Coleridge enthusiast. He begins his book by describing his intention: “to tell the story… of the two most remarkable poems in English”. In this opening chapter, evocatively titled “Chaos”, he also describes his primary source: one of Coleridge’s notebooks in the collection of the British Museum. This notebook, “partly in pencil, partly in ink, and always with most admired disorder”, contains quotations from readings the poet was doing between 1795 and 1798, the period when he wrote the two poems in question. Lowes points out that the entire contents of the notebook had actually been published “by Professor Brandl of Berlin, but it lies so effectively buried in a German philological periodical that the latest English edition of Coleridge refers to it as vaguely as if it had been published on the moon.” (Lowes, p. 5) He then goes on for several hundred pages, plus a hundred pages of footnotes, to demonstrate how texts the poet was reading were transformed through the actions of imagination, opium and dreams into great poetry. I have no idea how Lowes’ analysis stands today in the field of LitCrit. His book is still informative and his method illuminating for those who admire the mystery of Coleridge’s verse. The passage remembered and then quoted by Whalen comes from the conclusion of the chapters on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” where Lowes has traced the language Coleridge uses for both the speech of his imaginary seaman and his description of a North Atlantic he had never seen. Professor Lowes has been identifying words taken from Frederick Martens’ Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland as well as The Voyages of Captain James Cook, transformed into the music of Coleridge’s stanzas. Whalen does not remember this bit of Lowes’ enthusiastic prose:

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And so in “The Ancient Mariner” there was worked one of those miracles which have been the despair of poets every since: the inviolate keeping of a diction as rich as it is simple; luminously clear, and yet innumerable of stains and splendid dyes undreamed of even in the mariner’s vivid speech. At which point he quotes two stanzas of the poem and concludes: “I do not think I have been guilty of extravagance.” (Lowes, p. 301) What Whalen does remember is the shapely way Lowes explains the process he is describing by using Browning’s musical analogy. A poet can combine words. A musician can combine sounds. The alchemical magic of these artists transform their materials into something else, trans-substantial, immaterial. From The Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org) I learn that Browning’s poem is the imaginary monolog of a German composer and organist, George Joseph Vogler, and that Arthur Symons once called it “the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.” I find the full text of the poem in several locations on the Internet. I will quote the entire stanza, rather than just the two lines used by Lowes, quoted by Sitwell, remembered by Whalen: But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought; It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said: Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought: And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head! (Abt Vogler, lines 49-56)

I quote the whole because to make it clear how entwined the sacred and the arts were for the poets Whalen is remembering. Browning is writing about God, the laws of creation, and the transformative power of the imagination in one continuous breath. Such 19th century angst did not seem incongruous to this American poet in 1965, engaged in a magical act of education. If we read on in Lowes book to the chapter entitled “The Sleeping Images”, we learn that Coleridge was reading Bartram’s Travels describing his observations of the natural wonders of the Carolinas and Florida, James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, as well as the book that Coleridge himself identifies as the one he fell asleep over

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before dreaming “Kubla Khan”, Purchase His Pilgrimage, a compilation of sources by an 18th century English clergyman that had become a widely read source for information about foreign lands and cultures. Lowes demonstrates how, in the imaginative space of a poem, Coleridge built the palace of the Mongol emperor of China from fountains of fresh water erupting from the earth in Florida, women musicians in an Islamic paradise in Iraq, and the hairstyle of Abyssinian warriors in East Africa. The exposition of the sources is a demonstration of Lowes’ enterprise and erudition. We are asked to admire not the process of collecting and arranging (which Lowes insists was an unconscious act on Coleridge’s part) but the transformation that produced the finished art: the poems. What struck me as particularly relevant to Whalen’s work was the way Lowes characterized this relationship between the raw material – the texts copied into the notebook, the passages he finds in the books the poet was reading – and the finished poetry. The former illuminates the latter. An awareness of the poet’s reading gives us insight into the state of his creative mind. But the influence is not the poetry. The two are related but not continuous, certainly not the same thing. In Whalen’s writing they are the same thing, along with whether the poet is feeling hungry or broke, what flowers are on the table, and sounds coming from the street. Like John Cage, Whalen incorporates the metaphysical music in noise, because he focused on the creative process itself, the mind looking at the mind moving. This second movement of the poem ends with the poet citing his own use of “the network” available to him. I was assisted to this via Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. A trip to the main library is next—the Tesla coil either is or is not a real recollection. (Are TEKTITES really from outer space?)

I can find several explanations of tektites on the Internet. The current theory proposes they were formed by the tremendous pressure and heat from meteorites striking the Earth’s surface, though others propose they may have come from the Moon. Whalen does not return to the subject, perhaps leaving it to the reader to discover and contemplate these physical objects that appear to be the result of another transformation. The poem moves to the question about Nicola Tesla. What is a tesla? Whalen inserts into his poem (which is the same thing as his notebook) a series of definitions taken from Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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various books found in the library. We learn that “tesla” is an American electrician, a unit of magnetic induction, and a type of induction coil. He includes the entire definition of “tesla coil” along with the schematic drawing. This is followed by an injunction to the reader: In order to get the point of much of this part, go read (right now) pages 181-186 in History and the Homeric Iliad, by Denys Page, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963 (a paperback edition exists).

The poet is playing with the reader, but as with all humor in Whalen’s work, the message is serious. If we want to “get the point” of reading this poem, we have to make the effort to reach the state of mind of the poet. Reading the same books is a stage in that process. I look up citations to Denys Page’s book and learn that it is about the historical sources of the Iliad, a topic that, like the origin of tektites, is a matter of speculation. I sent an email to a friend who studied Classics, asking her to read these pages and send me a report. She generously finds the book at her university library, photocopies the five pages, includes eight more pages of footnotes for good measure, and sends them to me by fax. On page 181, Professor Page is in the midst of analyzing the surviving records translated from Linear B tablets found in the palaces of Pylos and Gnossos. These were centers of Mycenaean Greek culture which flourished between 1600 and 1100 B.C. The events described in the Homeric epics are now placed near the end of this period. Then, after five hundred years of city building, the literate, centralized Mycenaean culture collapsed. Contemporary scholars believe that the Iliad, arguably the earliest example of epic poetry from “our” civilization, was written four hundred years later during a time referred to as the Archaic Period. All this history is based on archeological evidence and translations of these pre-Homeric texts which Page is discussing. Page’s lectures were delivered in the late 1950s. A quick search for “Pylos Linear B” brings me to Lesson 25: The Linear B Tablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Economic Organization of “The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean” website at Dartmouth University (http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/ classics/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/25.html). The text in this source seems to confirm that what Page was talking about 50 years ago is still being taught. What he is talking about is how remarkably dissimilar the culture described in the Iliad is from the culture described in the Pylos tablets. These records demonstrate

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an omniscient bureaucracy with an “insatiable thirst for intimate detail”. A glance at these documents enables you at once to answer such questions as these: How many slaves has Korudallos, and what are they doing? How many sons did the weaving-women from Ti-nwa-to bear to the rowing-men at A-pu-ne-we? Who is watching over the cattle of Thalamatas? (Page, p.181) The professor’s point is that the epic poetry that we all continue to translate and read thousands of years later had already lost all memory of the kind of culture it was describing before it began. He concludes: The Iliad and Odyssey have no notion of a society of this type, an autocratic bureaucratic government, pervasive and penetrating, assessing and collecting and distributing, measuring and counting and recording. They are not even aware that labour was so highly specialized, or that slavery was an integral institution in social and religious life….the system disappeared from the earth, -- and with it disappeared the technical terms, for there was no longer any meaning in them or use for them. (Page, pp.186-187) There is no mention of slavery or specialization of labor in Homer. There is no bureaucracy recording the number of arrows used in each battle, the number of chariot wheels assigned to each member of each chieftain’s household, as there were in the written records of the time. Whalen is asking the reader to think about: what does this tell us about history? How reliable is our understanding of the past? What authority do we rely on? How stable is the table we are leaning on? Following the instruction to read this book he writes: This table stands on fidgety feet. Fidgety Feet is also the name of a song or piano solo, circa 1920odd *

The poet is looking at books in the San Francisco Pubic Library, not the current building, completed in 1993, but the former library which was in a wing of the City Hall topped

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by the enormous gilded dome modeled after the 17th century architecture of Les Invalides in Paris. Inside this gilded local copy of the Sun King’s architectural grandeur he is taking notes.

Assertions about history assertions of an unstable Insecure personality?

Between notes from books about Tesla, he makes notes about fruit trees and flowers – lemon, orange, lime, grapefruit, kumquat, tangerine – that grow in California. He is observing and thinking.

Assertions of personality and authority who will control the dictionary?

The elegant calligraphic flourishes on the initial capital of “assertions” transmits its own music. The poet finds a biography (Prodigal Genius, The Life of Nikola Tesla, 1944) and begins to write down details of Tesla’s life.

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It appears that Tesla was a genius of the highest order. He had an eidetic memory and imagination. He saw a vision of whirling magnetic fields while watching a sunset; his ideas for construction of alternating current generators, dynamos, transmission lines, controls and insulation, as well as the mathematical theory which would describe the operation of these things came to him that evening. He went to America and met George Westinghouse. They harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. Tesla was a nut. He had a germ phobia, gynophobia, and if we can believe his biographer, the only creature he loved in his adult life was a pigeon. But observe: He lighted the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. He also “let 1,000,000 volts of high-frequency high-voltage alternating current pass through his body for many minutes” while he held a globe in his hand which gave forth a brilliant light. Thomas Edison had told everyone it couldn’t be done, that alternating current was lethal. Thomas Edison and the Edison Company owned the street lighting system in New York in those days; it operated from a direct current dynamo…quite inefficiently. *

The poet does not actually give the answer to the question: “Did Nicola Tesla REALLY make a machine that could extract electrical voltage out of the very ground on which he stood.” That particular aspect of Tesla’s work, his plans to transmit power without wires and draw electricity directly from the earth, is still, “shrouded in mystery” to quote a recent book and PBS television documentary, Tesla, Master of Lightning (1994). Whalen is telling us the story of another visionary mind, a man with an “eidetic memory”. I find a definition of “eidetic” in the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “marked by or involving extraordinary accurate and vivid recall, especially of visual images.” And one quote from Tesla recorded on the PBS website provides a brilliant echo of the poem. "My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary," said Tesla, "that I must put out something commercial without delay." (PBS: Telsa-Master of Lightning: Poet and Visionary, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_poevis.html) Whalen goes back into his own memory. He was a country boy, born and raised in rural Oregon. His poems often recall and record lines of what he labeled “native speech”, western American colloquial phrases. He remembers: Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

“None of it came to nothing in the end 129

None of it amounted to a hill of beans.” That’s what my grandmother used to say.

Then, as a side note in the printed text, though it appears following these lines in the narrower calligraphic version, he quotes a line of Alcaeus from The Greek Anthology, first in Greek and then in English: “and nothing will / come of anything”. He presents the two edges of memory, a Living Voice and a record of the Ancient World. This is followed by a woman’s voice with the last word. * Gertrude Stein: “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” *

With the memory of this last voice recorded, the poem of the day – 27 July 1965 – appears to have ended. Whalen adds an endnote, dated three weeks later, answering for himself the fourth question on his list “What is history REALLY.” N.B., That History, being a writing, can be destroyed, or changed to suit whatever purpose the writer, the printer, the State may determine. History is a cat which can be altered to suit the owner. Nikola Tesla was a handsome man. He died all alone in a hotel room. A friend paid the bill – Tesla was broke.

The entire quest for education, for knowledge, for the understanding buried in memory and in books, is a quest for a mutable truth. Fact is propaganda. History is in the mind and the mind is moving.

Coda The long poems in The Collected come to an end around 1972, the year that Whalen was transfigured from a poet’s poet into a Soto Zen monk. During these last thirty years of his life, he produced the many wonderful short poems that fill the final hundred pages of the book. His life as a man of religion did not alter the themes or the tone of his writing very much. The rest of the world continued to go “to hell in a handbasket”, as he had written in 1958. He lived at the Tassajara monastery in the mountains near Carmel and the Zen Center in San Francisco. In the preface to the last large collection of new poems he published in 1980, he wrote:

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Ideal conditions prevail in the city and in the country. I continue, after all: and the consequences. (p.845)

These ideal conditions did not dull his wit. This summary of the put-downs of the Beat Generation was written at Tassajara. They said we was nowhere Actually we are beautifully embalmed in Pennsylvania They said we wanted too much. Gave too little, a swift hand-job no vaseline. We were geniuses with all kinds embarrassing limitations O if only we would realize our potential O if only that awful self-indulgence & that shoddy politics of irresponsibility O if only we would grow up, shut up, die & so we did & do & chant beyond the cut-rate grave digged by indignant reviewers O if we would only lay down & stay THERE – In California, Pennsylvannia Where we keep leaking our nasty radioactive waste like old plutonium factory Wrecking your white expensive world (Chanson D’Outre Tombe, p. 764)

This poem is dated 27:iii:1979. The Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown occurred on March 28. For a short period, he relocated to a Zen outfit in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then returned to San Francisco where he served as abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center. During this later period, Whalen developed a considerable reputation as a Buddhist poet. Buddhism is certainly an important aspect of his work. When the latter-day Mycenaean bureaucrats make their lists of American poets and divide them by religious affiliation – Presbyterians, Catholics, Methodists, Mormons, Baptists, Animists, Muslims, Jews – they will put Philip Whalen in the Buddhist column. They will further subdivide this column among the Asian traditions that flourish in the United States, placing his name under: Mahayana, Japanese Zen, Soto School. But any orthodox religious approach to his writing is another round hole

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through which we view the sparkling language of Whalen’s writing. The poetry itself is a network extending beyond the specific hole we choose to look through. In 1965, around the same time that Whalen wrote “The Education Continues Along”, Ted Nelson published a paper, “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate”. It was in this paper that he introduced the word hypertext “to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” This is the word we now use to describe the linked network of electronic documents we can find on the Internet. In 1981, Nelson published the first version of Literary Machines, a book in which he proposed the Xanadu Service, a utopian computer network through which all the world’s literature could be reached on screen. Nelson imagined a network of Xanadu stations available to everyone. As far as I could learn, Whalen did not know Nelson, and Nelson did not read Whalen’s poetry. I wondered if Lowes’ book, The Road to Xanadu, had played any role in Nelson choosing this name for his imaginary system. So I wrote him an email. He replied: I chose the name [Xanadu] 1) because "Kubla Khan" is the most romantic poem in the English language, 2) and because I loved it a lot; 3) because I deeply resented the intrusions of the conventional world to my own work and concerns, as exemplified by Coleridge's "person from Porlock"; 4) because I wanted the Xanadu service to be a magic place of literary memory, where no inspirations, ideas or work would get lost. (Ted Nelson, Feb 20, 2008) I propose that everyone immediately begin reading The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen and see where it leads. If you don’t understand a word or a phrase, look it up. Follow the ideas that appear as you go. And don’t let anyone from Porlock interrupt you.

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The Seduction of Yusuf by Zulaykha

Figure 1. “The Seduction of Yusuf by Zulaykha” Bahari p.109

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Sa’di composed the Bustan, a collection of Persian stories and parables told in verse, in the late thirteenth century. The author was a wanderer who left his home near Shiraz in present-day Iran and traveled the world, from Central Asia to Arabia to North Africa and then back to the eastern Mediterranean coast, before returning to his place of birth. There in his middle age he became a follower of the Sufi faith and wrote a collection of moral tales. In Sa’di’s lifetime the Latin Crusader armies harassed the Muslim world from Europe while the Mongol armies of Chingis Khan and his descendents defeated Islamic kingdoms throughout Central Asia. Two hundred years later, the Crusader kingdoms were gone, Asia Minor and all of Central Asia were Islamic kingdoms. The city of Herat in present-day Afghanistan was ruled by the descendants of the Turkish conqueror Timur, known to Europeans as Tamerlaine. In this cultural capital of the fifteenth century Islamic world, Sultan Husayun Mirza granted permission to a master painter, Kamal al-Din Bihzad, to illustrate a new copy of Sa’di’s Bustan, now a literary classic much admired by the Persian-speaking court. In the Sultan’s studio of book arts painter, Bihzad collaborated with the finest calligraphers and best illuminators in the world. For the final illustration of the book Bihzad chose to draw a moment in the story of Yusuf. The text of Sa’di’s poem recalls how Zulaykha, before trying to force Yusuf to make love with her, placed a cloth over the face of the idol she kept on her altar. She – a wife of the Egyptian king in some accounts, the wife of the king’s minister in other versions – does not want to offend the idol by letting it see what she is about to do. And Sa’di’s text reminds the reader that Yusuf, the righteous man, points out the folly of his seductress’ actions. She may feel she can hide her actions from the idol she worships by covering it’s face, Yusuf tells her, but know that no cloth can hide their actions from the true all-seeing God. Bihzad’s illustration measures about eight inches wide by twelve inches high. In three layers of rooms, walls, windows, stairways, doors, balconies, courtyards, and roofs he

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represents the interior and exterior of a great palace. There are two figures lunging across a room. We see the floor and the back wall of the room simultaneously. The man dressed in a green robe reaches out into space, his right hand at the top and center of a doorway. His head is wreathed in flames, the sign of a holy man favored by God. The woman’s face is exposed towards us, at the same level as the waist of the man. Her right arm reaches out toward his lowered left arm to form a parallel line with his raised right hand. Her left arm grasps at the bottom of his garment. She is suspended in space, her feet in one room that seems to hang like a balcony from an interior wall, while her upper body is in another room. There is no Egyptian idol to be seen covered with a cloth. Though the illustration was made for Sadi’s text, the source of the images is from another retelling of the same story in verse by the fifteenth century Persian poet Jami. To create the composition, Bihzad combined the parable of Sa’di’s then classical poem with the contemporary elaboration of the tale in Jami’s “Yusuf and Zulaykha”. In this version of the story, driven by her desire for Yusuf, Zulaykha orders a palace to be built. The palace is built of seven chambers. Each chamber conceals another chamber to the seventh level, a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box. She engages an old master painter whose fingers create great art through the movements of a brush. She orders him to fill the walls of the innermost chamber with scenes of herself and Yusuf making love. Jami, who was a poet at the same Herati court of Sultan Husayun Mirza, described this tale in a long poem consisting of hundreds of rhymed couplets. Bihzad imagines the architecture of the poem and builds a tower of angles and surfaces across which the woman reaches for the man. He is robed in green and she is robed in red. They are both young and fair. Their faces, hands, and feet are depicted in delicate flesh tones. His halo is golden flames. This Arabic version of the Hebrew story of Joseph was an ancient one in the Christian year 1488 A.D., the year the painter inscribes “the work of the slave Bihzad” in tiny Arabic letters on the panel between the upper window and the lower niche on the right-hand wall of the top left chamber in the palace. Yusuf leaps for the door as Zulaykha lunges towards him from the next room. The painter and the poets knew the story from a passage in the Koran, Yusuf, 12.23-25. Zulaykha is the wife of the Egyptian who buys Yusuf from traders, who in turn had rescued him from the well where his jealous brothers had abandoned him to die. The Jewish and Christian worlds know the story from the account of Joseph, son of Jacob

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by his second wife Rachel, Genesis 39:11-12. Joseph is still a youth of seventeen years when he arrives in Egypt, serving in the house of Potiphar, a member of the Pharaoh’s court. In Genesis the woman who tries to seduce him has no personal name and is simply called Potiphar’s wife. We can guess that these Hebrew and Arabic scriptures are a reduction of a longer and looser oral tradition. In each case, the scriptures distill the tale to a strong liquor of significant actions. Some versions of the story, repeated for thousands of generations, begins with a dream. The woman’s name is Zulaykha and she is the daughter of a king of the West, perhaps a city on the Moroccan coast, perhaps from Tunis. Jami tells us she sees a fair youth in her dream who tells her he is the Grand Vizier of Egypt. She sees this youth so clearly that her dream becomes as real to her as the world she lives in. She begs her father to arrange a marriage for her with a Vizier from the court of the Egyptian king. When he agrees, she gathers her people, her possessions and animals to travel to Egypt. She is married to a Vizier on her arrival, but he is not the man she saw in her dreams. She can still see that man in her mind. She knows that when she meets him, she will know him by his appearance. When Joseph arrives in Egypt, Zulaykha has already been the Vizier’s wife for many years and given birth to several children. Her eldest daughter is only a few years younger than this slave her husband buys from the traders. This is not the woman Bihzad chose to paint for Sultan Husayun Mirza. In his painting Zulaykha appears no older than Yusuf and he is a man, not a handsome boy. In another version of the story, the man Zulaykha must marry is a eunuch priest from the Egyptian temple and she arrives in the Land of the Nile just as the youth is being offered for sale at the slave market. She recognizes him immediately from her dream as she leans out of her litter and offers her jewels as payment for the slave. The slave is a beautiful youth, seventeen years old with unblemished skin. He speaks to his God whenever he requires something. He will not accept her sexual advances, no matter where they are or what she says to him. In Genesis Joseph overcomes hardship through cleverness and luck. The advances of Potiphar’s wife represent the wrong opportunity. Joseph knows better than to have relations with the master’s wife. He chooses to remain innocent and be wrongfully punished, then later overcomes prison through virtue of his talent for reading dreams. In the Koran Yusuf’s beauty is his important attribute, a reflection of his inner spirit. His master’s wife proves to the other women of Memphis that Yusuf’s appearance is enough Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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to drive any woman to covet him. She invites the other women to a feast, and gives them each fruit and a knife to cut it with. Yusuf is brought out in fine clothes, bathed and scented, and displayed before the women. They are transported by what they see. Their reaction is to carve their own hands in place of the fruit, oblivious to the pain, unaware

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Figure 2a, the Egyptian women stunned by Joseph’s beauty. Walters manuscript W.644 from Yusuf va Zulaykha, Walters Art Museum

of what they have done until the master’s wife points out their clothes stained with their own blood. And the women replied, This is no man, this is an angel. This is Yusuf, his head surrounded in golden flames, at the top and center of Bihzad’s illustration. He is a state of chastity and beauty that cannot be seen without inflaming passions to ravish and possess it, a lunge across the space of a bolted room. This is a moment before the other women have seen him. On the walls there are no blasphemous images of a man and a woman making love, though this may exists in the viewer’s imagination. There is only the interlocking geometry and flowers intertwined in patterns above the flames around his head. ***

Figure 3, “Portrait of an Artist” Bahari p. 175

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By 1488, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini had already painted works in oil for the Ottoman court, and the Turkish sultan had already sent these examples of the Italian Renaissance to Herat as a challenge to Sultan Husayun Mirza. Bihzad had replied with a painting of a painter at work on a portrait. The roundness of form in that answer to the Ottoman court is nowhere to be found in his other work and has no place in his illustrations for the book of Sa’di’s moral tales. The rabbis of Poland would be writing explanations of portions of the story of Joseph for another four hundred years, commenting on details that are suggested in the Koran and can also be found in the Swahili commentaries of Islamic West Africa. In a West African versions of the story her name is Zulaykha and her husband is Azizi, the king of Egypt. “You are handsome indeed” she says to Yusuf. “What is the use of beauty?” he replies, and to this day this phrase is recited by religious teachers in Timbuktu. Joseph has a special beauty in Genesis. He is “fair of form and fair to look at” (39:6), and the rabbis say the same words used to describe only one other person, his mother Rachel who died in childbirth bringing forth the second son named Benjamin. He must have resembled his mother, her appearance living on in his face, in the shape of his limbs, in the way he carried his weight. Potiphar’s wife fell in love with the same appearance that struck Jacob when he saw a woman drawing water from a well. Joseph is also drawn from a well and this is the subject of other Persian paintings in the sixteenth century illustrating not Sa’di but Jami’s poem. This ancestor who sees the future with his dreams, who is favored by God, who will control all the food in time of famine, outwit and reconcile with his brothers who wish to kill him, resist the woman who desires his youth-

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ful beauty when he is her slave and marry one of the same woman’s daughters when he is a rich and powerful minister, this is the Joseph transmitted by the rabbis. This is a complex man, a favored man, a man of remarkable beauty and contradiction. Why does he refuse to make love to her? He is a slave, trusted by his master with control of all the possessions in the household. This woman’s advances are a test. Can he manage this portion of the household correctly? Does he understand the boundary he is not to cross? He has no feelings for the woman, she is simply his master’s wife. He is a stranger, a foreigner, maintaining a loyalty to the family that tried to kill him and sold him into slavery. He conceals his identity so he can retain control and exercise it at the right moment. Favored by God and reader of dreams, he is far more than the physical beauty she sees. She hears him speak to his God under his breath when he needs something and she suspects that he is was not born a slave. There is a moment before the moment Bihzad chose to paint, the moment when Yusuf succumbs and is ready to give himself to Zulaykha. This moment is never chosen by the painters, the moment of weakness and the correction, the threat that Joseph receives to make it clear that he may possess human feelings but he cannot follow them. The rabbis remember how his mother, and then his aunt appear to him, followed by a vision of his father threatening that his descendants will not be priests if he gives in to this woman. Aroused by this vision in his moment of weakness, Joseph becomes impotent and decides to flee. But a moment later he is drawn back to the woman, only to see a vision of God holding the Eben Shetiyah, the rock on which the earth rests, and God says to him, “I will cast aside the rock and the world will fall into ruin if you touch this woman.”

Figure 4, “Yusof Lifted From the Well by his Brother,” Soudavar p. 213

*** In Jami’s poem the crisis ends with Zulaykha driven to suicide. She raises a knife to her own throat at this point and promises to kill herself if Yusuf will not fulfill her desires. And Yusuf raises his hand and takes the knife from her throat and requests the she be calm. He does not want anyone to die, certainly not his mater’s wife. Zulaykha responds to this compassion with all the physical desire she possesses. He prevents her from turning this passion on herself and she turns it on him. She thinks that he cares for her, that he wants to save her life. She reaches for him, kisses his lips, and grabs for his body beneath his clothes. They are locked inside the seventh chamber in a palace she has built to con-

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tain them both. The entire household is deserted. Everyone else has gone to the festival by the Nile. They are the only two figures in the painting, which by itself makes this illustration extraordinary. In every other picture we see hand maids, black male servants, ministers in various rooms, men riding into the courtyards, crowds of people attending an event. Bihzad has chosen to illustrate the moment when this woman is completely alone with her desire for this man. He lunges away from her mouth and her hands. In the painting he is reaching the door, standing firmly while she is grasping out towards him, about to lose her balance, clutching the back of his robe. Joseph will shed his garment in the next moment and Zulaykha will have only the clothing in her hands. In both Genesis and the Koran she tears the shirt from his back as he escapes. She will use this clothing to falsely accuse him of rape. The same shirt will prove that she is lying, as it is torn from the back, not from the front. The judges recognize that Yusuf has shed his clothing as he struggled to get out of her grasp. He is blameless and loved by God. In the Koran Zulaykha is mocked by the women of Memphis until she invites them to slice the fruit and look at their own blood soaking their clothes. She asks them how they can blame her when she must look at his beauty every day in her own household. This beauty cannot be lived with, it must be thrown into prison. Yusuf escapes from the seventh chamber of the

Figure 5, detail, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Seduction of Yusuf by Zulaykhaâ&#x20AC;? Bahari p.109

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palace built to confine him, is placed on trial, and cast into a prison cell where he reads the dreams of other prisoners. Eventually he will be drawn out of this cell by the King himself, to read the dreams of surplus and famine, visions of the economy of the earth. *** Three decades before Bihzad painted this book illustration in Herat, the Tuscan Italian painter and geometer Piero della Francesca labored on a series of frescos to decorate a church in a city near the town of his birth. On the walls of San Francesco in Arezzo, Piero created a series of narrative paintings of the Legend of the True Cross, beginning from the death of Adam and ending with the triumph of Constantine. The story is told in an order determined by the formal geometry of the figures rather than the sequence of the narration. The Queen of Sheba bends to pray beside her hand maidens on the road to meet King Solomon. Piero’s geometry controls how the story is told. Bihzad’s geometry suggests the palace rooms in the tiny illustration. Piero’s angel descends toward the tent of the sleeping Constantine to transmit a vision. The cross in the angel’s outstretched hand illuminates a dream the reader sees behind the Emperor’s closed eyelids.

Figure 6, “Judas Pulled Up by the Hair,” Lavin p. 54

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In a panel to the left of the church window, halfway up the wall, is the scene known as the torturing of the Jew. The figure is half in, half out of a well. The wood from which he is suspended balances with another panel on the right showing the wood of the True Cross being buried by three figures beside a pool in the ground. The man coming out of the well is the only person in Jerusalem who knows where the True Cross is buried. The Christian Queen Helena has ordered that he be thrown into the well because he refuses to tell her its location. In the thirteenth century version of this legend that Piero would have know, he is known as Jude or Judas, and he is a Jew. He emerges from the well after seven days, agreeing to tell Helena that the cross is buried under a temple to Aphrodite. A well-dressed official pulls him out by the hair of his head. It is a painful gesture meant to remind us of how the angel carried Habakkuk by the hair to join Daniel in the lion’s den. ***

Figure 7, Nuremberg Chronicle

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She becomes a visual symbol in the iconography of the Latin Church, a tradition that continues into the Renaissance. She is a reclining ogress on the gates of French monasteries, a mnemonic for the sin of lust. She appears in the Nuremberg Chronicles of 1493, one of the first European books combining printed text and illustrations, produced in the workshop where Albrecht Dürer worked as an apprentice. The composition collapses Joseph’s moment of temptation with his defense before the Egyptian Pharaoh (Pharao mephres).

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A respectable-looking woman (Uros putifar) is pulling on Joseph’s red cloak, moving towards the bed exposed through an opening in the wall. Joseph ignores her – his face and hand gestures are interpreting dreams for the regent sitting on his throne. Everything is under control. An illustration for a 16th century Persian manuscript edition of Jami’s poem, now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, presents a very different image. The artist presents us with Zulaykha overcome by a vision of Yusuf she has received in a dream. Her head is uncovered and her hair hanging down to her knees. Two attendants restrain her arms while a third attaches a chain to her ankle. Everything is not under control.

Potiphar’s wife is gone from Genesis once the son of Jacob is cast into prison. But Jewish oral commentaries continue the story omitted from the Tanakh. The rabbis of Chernobyl remember the name of Asenath, the Egyptian wife given to Joseph by the Pharaoh as a part of his rewards. Asenath is one of the king’s daughters. In fact, they tell us, she is one of Zulaykha’s daughter. Her lineage makes her no more proper a wife for Joseph than the Egyptian woman he refused. But this is only how the surface appears to the uneducated. In defense the rabbis carefully reveal that Asenath too is an adopted child who came from Caanan, and each letter of her name is meant to explain her beauty, perfection, and piousness to those literate enough to read it properly. Asenath had even testified about Joseph’s innocence when he was accused by Potiphar’s wife, they explain. And during the seven years of plenty she gave him two sons. But during the years of famine he would not make love with her. The story continues in Jami’s poem. Zulaykha does not disappear from the life of Yusuf. The old king dies and

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Figure 8, Zulaykha, having seen Yusuf in a dream, is mad with love for him and has to be secured with chains. Illustration of the poem Yusuf u Zulaykha, from the Haft Awrang of Jami, Catalogue of Persian, [&c] Mss. Bodleian Library, Part I, 898.

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Yusuf rules the land. He travels around his kingdom to bring relief during the famine. During one journey he meets an old woman standing beside her hut made of reeds. In the illustrated copy of Jami’s poem from the royal library of Abdollah Khan, sixteenth century ruler of Bokhara, this woman is a stooped figure in a green cloak, her head and back covered with a plain white scarf. She is a squat old woman and Yusuf is an elegant man on a white horse, a beautiful quiver of arrows on his thigh held by a golden belt. He tips his head toward the woman standing beside the hut, the holy flames around his head obscuring a part of the blue canopy an attendant holds to shield him from the sun. The attendants on horse and foot look on or talk among themselves. This is the only picture of how the story ends.

Figure 9, “Yusof Meets Zulaykha as an Old Woman,” Soudavar p. 215

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The poet and the imams say Zulaykha has spent many years weeping and suffering. She has finally given up praying to her idol. She has prepared for forgiveness. But forgiveness for what? they ask. What is her fault? She has aged while Yusuf has remained young. She is human while he is more than human, favored by God. In Jami’s verse as she stands before him again, she repents for her false accusations. Her passion for him is as fresh as her body is old. Yusuf is moved by her words and offers to answer her wishes. He offers her food to carry her through the famine. She asks to be with him each day and night to serve him. Jami tells us that the prayers from Yusuf’s lips transformed the old woman into a girl younger and lovelier than the one who had first tempted him. And then when asked for one more wish she asked to be his wife. Yusuf refuses to answer her. At this moment, the angel Gabriel appeared to tell them both that their marriage is ordained by God’s as an answer to Zulaykha’s humility and prayers. The imams of Africa offer a different conclusion. Zulaykha pleads with the visiting king for food. She is now a poor woman and starving along with the others. Her passion returns when she recognizes Yusuf. Gabriel appears, announcing that she has endured patiently and persevered. He will give her to Yusuf as a wife as her reward. But Yusuf protests that she is far too old. Zulaykha asks Yusuf to pray that God restore her youth. He does this and she is transformed into a twelve year old girl. Only then does Yusuf agree to the angel’s command. Yusuf and Zulaykha have two sons and a single daughter. Their daughter’s name is the Arabic word for mercy.

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Potiphar's wife as one of the deadly sins, gates of a monastery in Poitou, France, circa 11th century (photo by the author)

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References Bahari, Ebadollah, Bihzad, Master of Persian Painting, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996. Reproduction and discussion of “The Seduction of Yusuf by Zulaykha” is found on p. 109 in the chapter “Bihzad’s Mature Timurd Herat Works, 1488-1510,” with discussion on pp. 108112. The “Portrait of an Artist” from the Freer Gallery of Art Washington is on pp. 174-175 of the same chapter. Soudavar, Abolala, Art of the Persian Courts, Selections from the Art and History Trust Collection, New York: Rizzoli, 1992. Behzad (c. 1467-1535) is discussed pp. 95-109 in the chapter on The Court of Soltan Hosayn Mirza Bayqara in a section on The Court Painters of Herat. The examples are drawn from “The Bustan (Orchard) of Sa’di” dated A.H. 893/1488 in the collection of the General Egyptian Book Organization, Cairo (Adab Farsi 908). This is the book in which The Seduction of Yusof (fol. 52b) is found, but it is not reproduced here. Soudavar cites Lentz and Lowry, p. 260 for the illustration. Illustrations from “Yusof-O Zolaykha of Jami” copied by Mahmud son of Es-haqe Shahabi for Abdollah Khan Bokhara, dated A.H. 973/1565 are on pp. 212-215. “Yusof Meeting Zolaykha as an Old Woman” 80e is on p. 215. Wickens, G. M., Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned, The Bustan of Sa’di, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Sa’di is born in 1200 in Shiraz and dies there around 1292. The Bustan is published in the 1250s. Chapter 9, On Repentance and the Right Course, Tale 154, Zulaikha’s shame before her idol, pp. 236-237, notes on pp. 308-309. Yohannan, John D., The Poet Sa’di, A Persian Humanist, Persian Studies Series, No. 11, Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1987. Yohannan gives the date for the composing of the Bustan as 1257. He dates Rashid ud-din as 1247-1318, so two generations after Sa’di. There is a brief discussion of Tale 154 on pp. 51-52. The emphasis is on the covering the eyes of the idol.

Yohannan, John D., Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in World Literature, An Anthology of the Story of the Chaste Youth and the Lustful Stepmother, New York: New Directions, 1968. This work cites and reproduces translations from: Genesis 39.1-23 Koran chapter 12, verse 21-35, 50-54

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“Yusuf and Zulaikha” by Jami (1414-1492), translated by Ralph T.G. Griffith and Alexander Rogers, pp. 166-220. Yohannan cites no publication for either Griffith or Rogers translations. He says he has abridged and combined Griffith with the last scene by Rogers, as Griffith’s is an abridgment of the original Persian. This version of the story contains the description of the palace she builds for Yusuf. It also gives her a complete motivation. She is a princess from Morocco who has visions of her beloved that she expects to meet in Egypt. She is betrothed to the Pharaoh’s captain, who is a eunuch. Only after her journey to Egypt and marriage does she meet Yusuf and recognize him from her dream. Ginzberg, Louis, Legends of the Bible, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. This is a shorter version of the author’s seven volume The Legends of the Jews, published after his death. The story of Joseph is found on pp. 194-265, including a section on “Joseph and Zuleika”. Knappert, Jan, Islamic Legends, Histories of the Heroes, Saints and Prophets of Islam, vol. I, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985. “The Legend of Yusuf, or Joseph” is found on pp. 85-103. Knappert’s introduction notes that “the legend is popular from the Berbers in Morocco to the Hausas in Nigeria.” He cites as the source of his translation a manuscript whose author “may have been the well known poet and scribe Mohammed b. Abu Bakari Kijuma, of Lamu, who died probably in 1945.” He also cites his own Four Swahili Epics, 1964, pp. 9-57. Niehoff, Maren, The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992 This discusses the treatment of the Joseph story in Genesis, Philo, Josephus, and Genesis Rabbah Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca: San Franceso, Arezzo, New York: George Braziller, 1994 The discussion of the panel depicting “Raising of Judas from the Well” is p. 50-51, the detail and discussion “Judas Pulled Up by the Hair” and the reproduction of “Habakkuk Carried by an Angel” are on pp. 54-55, and the torture of Judas by St. Helena are in the Introduction on p. 24. Lavin notes that this depiction is based in part on a story in Boccacio’s Decamerone, “the hilarious story of Andreuccio da Perugia, when the hero goes to Naples to buy a horse, he falls into a dung heap, after which he is in dire need of a bath. Tomb robbers lead him to a well where there is usually a rope, pulley, and a great bucket. Finding the bucket gone, they tie Andreuccio to the rope and lower Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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him down. Guards of the watch, coming for water, are terrified when, instead of the bucket, Andreuccio appears.” An engraving illustrating Andreuccio climbing out of the well is reproduced on p. 50. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Lavin dates the entire fresco cycle at Arezzo as 1452-66. The panel, “Judas Raised from the Dry Well” is discussed and reproduced on pp. 80-81. Here she notes that Judas, who is a secret Christian, later becomes the close confidant of his torturer St. Helena and becomes the bishop of Jerusalem. Angelini, Alessandro, Piero della Francesca, Florence: Scala/ Riverside, 1985. Angelini reproduces and describes the panel “Torture of the Jew” on pp. 34-35. This is probably the traditional name for the panel.

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PAUL KAHN is saying [about Krzysztof Lenk] :

I was working at a computer research institute at Brown University with a group of young geniuses. The young geniuses were programming a hypertext system and I had the wonderful job of imagining what to do with it. Visual design had suddenly transformed the computer screen into something worth looking at. Rhode Island School of Design was down the street. I knew they knew something I didn’t know. I called the graphic design department looking for a collaborator, a designer interested in digital media. The chairman was very busy, but he told me to call Kris Lenk.

from Projekty i bazgroły / Projects and Doodles by Krzysztof Lenk, słowo/ obraz terytoria, 2010

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During the decade I worked with Krzysztof, I learned a great deal about what I didn’t know: the qualities of European typography, the history of visual expression, the principles of information graphics, the pleasure of taking on assignments that none of us knew how to solve until we solved them. Krzysztof had internalized the rules of visual communication the way a jazz musician internalizes the scales and structure of sound. And he knows how to improvise. Moving to a foreign country can create a profound disruption of balance. Suddenly you are surrounded by people who know nothing about the history and culture of the world you came from. You, in turn, are as ignorant as a child about the simplest facts of life. What are the rules of baseball? How to celebrate Thanksgiving? There is nothing more American than reinventing yourself. Krzysztof became a teacher of information design. What better way to get your students to explain things to you? As a teacher, he divined the problems that would teach his students how to find their own gifts. If the student was clever, her solutions revealed the rules. What better way to learn the value of white space, the potential energy of a black square at the top of a page, the meaning of a circle? I watched him teach many gifted designers, in the classroom and in our studio. They already knew how to make the surface obey

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their idea of fashion. His assignments showed them that design did not happen on that surface. It happened in the mind of the viewer.

Krzysztof had a secret weapon: an enormous collection of 35mm slides. When removed from the black binders or slide carrousels and spread out on a light box, these tiny pieces of film revealed solutions to all the problems of visual communications. They came from the National Gallery of London, Sumerian relief carvings, the Nuremburg Chronicles, Raymond Lull, Robert Fludd, Herbert Bayer, Otto Neurath, William Hogarth, Chinese landscapes, Persian miniatures, Simon Stevin, the Turgot map of Paris, Tibetan medical charts, Biblia Pauperum. They were all solutions to complex information problems. We mixed in desktop interfaces, multimedia publications, application icons, and performed consciousness-raising two screen slide lectures in two voices for the computer crowd.

Kris showed me that the design problem was in the way the information was structured. His greatest work reveals the structure that is there. Once you see his solution, the idea behind it can be reused a thousand different ways. Clients would sometimes look at what we produced and ask â&#x20AC;&#x153;where is the design?â&#x20AC;? The design was that transparent.

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Learning Information Architecture

First Get a Job I arrived in Boston in the fall of 1972. I had left my home in the suburbs of New York City, gone to college in Ohio, spent the previous 18 months in Kansas. Kansas was a foreign land to a person from New York City. It was filled with friendly people and endless space. In Kansas you can see great distances. Much of the land is flat. Trees are sparse and grow along the shallow rivers. Highways are wide and straight. The tallest buildings are silos for storing grain. You can see large weather patterns that may be hundreds of miles away during the day and chain lightning leaping across the sky at night. I had studied literature and wanted to be a writer. More specifically I wanted to be a poet. This was not a lucrative career path and I needed to find a way to support myself. In Kansas I had been a part-time graduate student and parttime Elementary School teacher. Now I was going to a training program in Vermont to get a teaching license. I had three months to fill. I had not learned the art of creative lying. I didn’t want to tell an employer that I was going to stay for a year to get a “regular” job. A friend suggested I could support myself by driving a taxi. The taxi fleets owned many cars and hired drivers by the day. The commitment was one day at a time. The driver earned a percentage of the fare plus tips. There was a taxi garage a short walk from the apartment where I was staying. In some major US cities, a driver must pass an examination to prove he or she knows their way around before they can operate a taxi. In Boston, Massachusetts all you needed was a driver’s license and verification from the Boston Police that you had no police record. I had a driver’s license, no police record and almost no idea of where things were. And that’s how I became a Boston cab driver. I was not a total stranger to Boston. Parts of my family had settled there a hundred years before. My family drifted south, but some of my mother’s relatives were still there. So I had visited Boston as a child. I remembered being impressed by how strangely people drove their cars. The driving style in New York is aggressive but orderly. People Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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drove fast and routinely cut in front of each other, filling all available space. In Boston, drivers followed a different code. They seemed to pay no attention to traffic signals and frequently made U-turns in the middle of major roads, as if the only thing that mattered was where they wanted to go. Though I had visited the city, I really did not know my way around. My relatives all lived outside the city center. Most of the pathways I knew were routes of a suburban outsider – how to get from one highway exit to a specific destination and return to the highway. Then Get Lost When I started driving the cab, I bought a book of maps. It was the cab driver’s bible, listing every street in every town. Each map contained the streets of a single town. In the back there was an index of road names, with a code to indicate the town, page and sector of the map. In theory, a driver could find his way to any address by looking up the street in the index and finding its coordinates on a map. This was the solution for the microcosm. But the macrocosm was more difficult to grasp. How do I get from here to there? Understanding the transition from one town to the next was the truly difficult problem. Often I could find the destination on a map, but could not figure out how to get to the town. In retrospect, I can see that this was a case of mismatch between information organization and the user’s mental model. This particular user (me) had no mental model of how to get from West Medford to East Malden or from Downtown Crossing to Broadway in Somerville. The experienced cabbie had the macrocosm in his head, and used the maps to fill in the infinite detail. No one had made a book for a cab driver with good eyes and an empty mind. If someone got into my cab and knew how to get to where they were going, we were fine. If they didn’t, it was an adventure. Boston is one of the oldest American cities. Its urban development has a distinctly organic side. It began as a group of settlements in the seventeenth century around the curved shoreline of the harbor where the Mystic and the Charles rivers emptied into the Massachusetts Bay. Each settlement had grown into a town built along the English model, with a central commons for grazing animals, a church and buildings for public assemblies. The towns were connected by paths suitable for horses and cattle. By the eighteenth century, the harbor was the commercial center and became the city. In the nineteenth century, water-powered industry developed along the rivers and canals. Adjacent towns which had once

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been farming communities became factory and warehouse complexes. As railroad, trolleys and cars were introduced in the twentieth century, the pathways that connected the towns were still based on the original cattle paths. The oldest part of Boston along the harbor became known as The Hub because all the inland roads led to this area, forming the shape of spokes joining at the waterfront. But the resulting pattern was less hub-and-spoke than a hub-and-spokeand-web. Every major road runs at oblique angles to other major roads. Some roads follow creeks or small rivers, while others simply connect the dots that once were villages. The Charles River had become a placid lake separating Boston from the town of Cambridge. In one small part of the growing city, wetlands were filled to make new real estate. On this virgin territory, known as Back Bay, the streets were laid out in a perfect grid, with street names in alphabetical order. To a New Yorker, this seemed like a reassuring and familiar pattern. To a Bostonian, it was simply a charming aberration. The ancient mail roads, eighteenth century public thoroughfares that joined Boston to the other commercial centers in the south, west and north, became State Routes joining Boston to nearby cities such as Providence, Rhode Island, Worchester, Massachusetts or Manchester, New Hampshire. Many major roads crossed not at intersection but at rotaries, a distinctly British influence that took root in old New England. When the traffic was still pulled by horses, each road was marked by a carved stone announcing the number of miles to the next major city. As cars replaced horses, the signs were expanded to two bits of information: the closest town and the next major city. In Boston, these pre-highway signs had never been replaced. They continued to tell the driver nothing about any of the other nearby towns he might reach if he chose this exit from the rotary. By the 1970s, anyone driving to another major city would not use these small roads with traffic lights and stop signs that passed through each small town. Everyone used the high-speed interstate highways system. That entire system, which sliced up old neighborhoods in cities such as Boston, had been created by Eisenhower to assure the fluid movement of troops across the country. In this case, the word â&#x20AC;&#x153;sliceâ&#x20AC;? was not a metaphor. When the Massachusetts Turnpike was built, starting from Boston harbor and stretching west, the city planners dug a canyon that divided the city. This central city was bifurcated by a chasm into northern and southern segments.

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Listen to the Code Talkers Ambitious cab drivers filled their day by taking fares from the radio. Each cab had a two-way radio tuned to the frequency used by the fleet. From the office, a voice would announce “I need a car at 14 Tremont going to Cambridge, who’s near Tremont” and drivers who knew what they were doing would grab their mike, press the button and announce “Number 12 for 14 Tremont” at which point the voice would say “Okay, Mike, you got it. Who’s on Beacon Hill? Two fares going to Broadway in Somerville.” I just listened. I wasn’t sure how to get to 14 Tremont anyway. On the occasion when I recognized an address, I wasn’t fast enough. Mike or Sam or Billy got the fare before I could press the button. The efficiency of the system was too much for me. This was my initiation into the world of code talkers. The two-way radio is a narrow channel of communication, with minimum space for output and feedback. The radio operator was receiving phone calls and translating them into the smallest possible verbal message. The listener was required to take these compressed verbal bits and rapidly expand them into a calculation of where he was, how long it would take him to get from here to the fare, and add a judgment as how long it would take to get another fare when he dropped them off. Mike and Sam and Billy could do this in a few seconds. It was many years before I learned that code talking is a basic feature of person to person communication and human computer interaction. It is a method for compressing two critical elements of sending and receiving a signal: length and meaning. This is how pilots talk to air traffic controllers and how CB radio operators converse. A third critical element is a protocol: the expected sequence in which codes are exchanged. The cab driver listens for a request, the radio operator make a request, the cab driver responds, the radio operator acknowledges the response and the transaction is completed. UUCP (Unix to Unix Communication Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), two early methods for moving data between computers, are basically the same thing as a radio operator calling cabs to pick up a fare. One machine sends another machine a request to open a channel. If the other machine responds with the correct acknowledgement, the first machine continues, until the finale: end of file sent (EOF) and end of file received (EOF ACK). It is the perfect system – fast, efficient, unambiguous – when the mental models of the sender and receiver match: both sides understand the same code and the same protocol. If you aren’t familiar with the protocol, you don’t know how to respond. And if you don’t understand the code, you

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don’t get the message. I also wasn’t motivated to learn. By the second week, I just turned the radio off. Listen to Your Fare I didn’t talk much, but I listened. I only drove during daylight hours. It was better money to drive at night, but I had a hard enough time recognizing the buildings and the streets in the day. For personal comfort, I found a few taxi stands where I was likely to pick up a fare that knew where he or she was going. I waited in front of large department stores – people going home from a day of shopping usually know how to get home. The first move of the morning often determined the rest of the shift. If I picked up a person arriving at the train station I often found myself waiting at the taxi pool of the airport. I read books. I read the essays in Silence by John Cage waiting in the taxi pool at Logan Airport. Cage, the American composer who introduced random sound (noise) and chance into contemporary music, wrote “If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.” I was driving around in a sea of noise and it seemed to have little or no continuity. I needed find the way to organize it. I learned my way around by looking for the pattern. Patterns of information tell us where we are, where we are going, and where we should not go. I learned where to go and where not to go from my own experience. Not being from Boston, my mind was relatively empty on the topic of local racial stereotypes and tribal agreements. I saw parts of the city as a cab driver that I never saw again when I returned to live there for over a decade. When a person got into my cab, I took them where they wanted to go. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to accept a fare going to the Columbia Point Housing Project, a high-crime area that other drivers avoided. One day when an African-American woman got into my cab and told me to take her there, I followed her directions. When I dropped her off, I looked around and tried to figure out how to get back to familiar territory. There, rising above the top of the buildings in the distance, was the Prudential Center, the tallest building in the city. I was able to keep this landmark in sight through the windshield as I found my way back to the Hub. When I read Romedi Passini’s Wayfinding in Architecture many years later, I already knew what he was talking about. Being honest about my lack of knowledge did not get me good tips, but it got me good advice. Once I told my fare that I didn’t know how to get to where he wanted to go, he often taught me his favorite shortcut home. My passenPaul Kahn | Collected Essays

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gers shared their knowledge about which avenues to avoid at certain times of day and how to follow service roads alongside a crowded highway. Boston has a rich tradition of traffic congestion. In those years, it still had many uncontrolled intersections where traffic from several roads simply converged at entrances to highways, bridges and tunnels. I listened to my fareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s advice and learned how to find a littleknown crossing of the same river or a rarely used entrance to the same highway. I read Steps Toward An Ecology of the Mind by Gregory Bateson while waiting for fares in front of the Fileneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department Store. From Bateson I learned about cybernetics, feedback loops and the biological definition of information: a difference that makes a difference. The city was made up of different kinds of roads, different kinds of intersections, different kinds of neighborhoods. The Boston traffic network was my first experience of systems theory. On the street, this was not an abstraction. The network itself was the subject. It was a complex, multi-dimensional manmachine interface. The machine was the combination of the car which varied from day to day, sometimes with poor brakes, leaking windows, and a hole in the floor; the roads with potholes, blind intersections, turning lanes, and double-parked cars; the traffic that depending on the time

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of day, a baseball game at Fenway Park, and the ever-changing weather. The state of the network was set in motion when someone tapped on my window or opened my door to announce where I was going next. By the time I turned in my last cab I had learned a small but fundamental lesson. I had learned how to find my way around a complex network. I had learned how to observe and internalize patterns, how to build overviews and routes in my head from previous experience. Six months later, I returned to Boston and lived there for another decade. By the time I left, my mind was a rich database of routes from one part of the network to another. I could anticipate traffic patterns when a Harvard football game and freezing rain at five oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock in November meant to avoid Route 2 and Storrow Drive when driving from Arlington to Watertown. I could tell the cab driver how to get me from Medford to Logan Airport at six oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock on Friday without getting stuck in traffic by navigating the back roads of Chelsea. The day I left to take a job at a computer research institute at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, I was very upset. I remember thinking: all this special knowledge gone to waste! My brain was full of information I would never use again. It was another decade before I realized that nothing had been wasted. I came to understand that I had learned wayfinding and navigation systems. My experience listening to my passengers taught me humility and empathy. The people moving through the network were the most important source of knowledge. Getting lost taught me that I could understand a system I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know by using it. Understanding was a matter of seeing the patterns in the information. Seeing the patterns requires a fresh and open mind, listening to the users and examining the data. In 1995, Richard Saul Wurman asked Krzysztof Lenk for a contribution to his new book. Kris and I had been collaborating for five years at that point, creating overview diagrams. It was our way of simplifying information, drawing our clients away from their fixation on the microcosm of specific features and banners and buttons, to make them see the larger system. We wanted them to see where all the electronic neighborhoods connect and the user passes from one district to another accomplishing a task. Wurman called his book Information Architects. It was at that point that I understood. I had received my training in information architecture driving a taxi in Boston.

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The Central Question: the introduction to Misunderstanding Mongolia

The year of Our Lord 2006 is the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongolian State. At a political convocation on a grassy steppe in 1206, following years of warfare between various tribes and clans, a man known as Temujin was elected as leader of the people. He was elected in much the same way rulers had been elected by their peers in many social contexts. At the time, this event went unreported to the world outside of steppe nomad culture. If we believe various sources recorded at a later date and interpreted by generations of men literate in any of dozens of languages, Temujin was given that day the title of Chinggis Qan. That name made its way into English through the French as Genghis Khan. Khan is more or less equivalent to king, but what the Genghis means is a the kind of question scholars like to write articles about. Perhaps it was meant to express the concept that he was now ruler of all the people surrounded by the ocean which itself surrounds the world in which men live. In 1206 the people who elected Temujin were the population of a human culture that lived outside the boundaries of the sedentary world. In three human generations this culture – led by this man, his sons and his grandsons – conquered the world as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as the Mediterranean Sea, as far north as the Siberian forests, as far south as the Indus River. The central question on everybody’s minds when they get far enough into studying the appearance of Mongolia in history is “how did the Mongols do that?” How did this tribe, this band of people, this group of nomads living from the milk, meat and skins of their herds of animals, sheltered only by felt tents, this illiterate society with no organized religion, no innovative technology, no natural source of wealth – how did these people conquer a vast territory that included the urban, literate, technologically innovative, religiously and philosophically sophisticated cultures we like to call human civilization? These events are not a figment of our modern imagination. They did not take place so long ago, in a world far removed from our own modern world. Contemporary accounts survive in many written languages: Chinese, Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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Tanghut, Tibetan, Mongolian, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Russian, French, Syriac, and Latin. Scientific archeology and scholarly enquiry, much of it due to the intervention of Western cultures into Asia, and continuing with decades of Asian inquiry and self-examination, continues to amass new evidence and generate interpretation. We can understand how an invading people can take over, how the Spanish conquered Mexico, how the British took over India. How the Mongols managed to take over China and Korea, the Middle East up to the borders of Syria and Egypt, and what is today known as Russia, this is not an easy question to answer. I do not propose to even try. Perhaps the more constructive question, the one we should really ask ourselves today is why it is so difficult to understand? I would propose that the main reason is that the Mongols are identified with the stereotype of the Barbarians. Barbarians in the Mediterranean tradition are, tautologically speaking, invaders without culture who destroy civilization. In the modern world, civilization destroys less sophisticated, less advanced cultures. Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Imagine North America in the 1800s. Imagine for the sake of this experiment two fictions: that infectious disease had not decimated the native population and that they have a social tradition that spans their tribal groups, that unites them across their clan boundaries when the motivation arises. Hundreds of different human groups, tribes, clans, bands, living ways they have lived for thousands of years, hunting, gathering, growing and harvesting plants. Add a third fiction: imagine the horse had not been re-introduced from Iberia only two hundred years before but had survived the Ice Age and coevolved with these people since the Pleistocene. Try to see these imaginary People. At their frontiers, along their margins, are another culture, the Euro-Americans – literate, agrarian and urban, masters of the machines of the young Industrial Revolution. These other people have settled the coastal plain and the river valleys, moving into the territory of The People for hundred of years. Perhaps one of these Euro-American group – let’s pick the Mormons – needs a military ally to support them in their struggle against the other Euro-American groups. They join with the largest native band – let’s pick the Apache who have been fighting a war with the Spanish spanning ten generations – arm them and fight along side them to secure their new territory, call it the Great Basin. After winning these battles, the native band begins to grow – their success breeds new wealth which breeds more success. They use this advantage

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to cross the Rocky Mountains, defeat the band to the east and absorb them into a larger union of tribes. Word of the change of power spreads across the Great Plains and Prairie. More tribes join the union. A great army moves east across the Prairie and attacks the small cities of Kansas City and Saint Louis. Crossing the Mississippi, the army continues along the south shores of the Great Lakes and lays siege to Chicago and Detroit. Each settlement is told to surrender or be destroyed. The captives with useful skills â&#x20AC;&#x201C; engineers, blacksmiths, masons, carpenters â&#x20AC;&#x201C; are pressed into service, while the rest of the population is captured. The men without useful skills are slaughtered. The women and children are adopted and distributed among clans as servants. A few are left to fend for themselves, cut off from contact and supplies from the East. The armies reach the Atlantic Coast and lay siege to Boston, New York, Philadelphia. The government of the United States surrenders and the small city of Washington is abandoned. Those who can flee take their ships across the Atlantic or head for South America. The Leader with his army withdraws to the West, well armed, heavy with material wealth, swollen with new technology and units of Euro-American soldiers, captured officials pressed into service who now work for The Tribe. The sons of the Leader now plan their next move. An army is prepared for an invasion of Mexico. This all sounds quite backwards. Americans all know the story told in the other direction. Literate culture is inevitably stronger than the illiterate. Technological sophistication is always superior to the primitive. Civilized cultures are always better organized than Barbarians. But a study of the Mongols teaches us that these modern beliefs did not apply. The illiterate became literate when they felt the need. The technologically unsophisticated absorbed and adapted technology much faster than their civilized adversaries. And the Barbarians, who from a distance seemed to have no sense of order and always fought among themselves, formed their army into decimal units of ten, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, solved logistic challenges to move men and materials over thousands of miles, and ultimately built a mobile communication network of riders that spanned Eurasia. The planet today is filled with cultures that are based on their selective memory of where they came from, defining the homeland that are rightfully theirs. The sprawling Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus, Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, the polyglot European Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkistan, Krygistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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North and South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the archipelago of Indonesia, the Han majority and national minorities of the Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Republic of China, Pakistan and the billion citizens of India, the Kingdom of Jordan and the tiny State of Israel â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all of them exist today on a history intertwined with the military, political and cultural exploits of the Mongols. In many of these parts of the world, the Mongol armies are remembered as a destructive force that appeared from the east or from the north and destroyed the world. The Mongolian Peace that redistributed the cultural wealth of Eurasia is buried in multi-cultural denial. But there is one place on earth where Genghis Khan is remembered as a great hero and founder of a nation.

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A Review: The Secret History of the Mongols by Igor de Rachewiltz

The Secret History of the Mongols up to the Twentieth Century

The Secret History of the Mongols, A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, translated with a historical and philological commentary by Igor de Rachewiltz, Brill’s Inner Asian Library, Volume 7/12, Leiden: Brill, 2004, (hardcover, 2 volumes, 1347 pages) ISBN 90 04 13159 0

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Sometime during the first half of the thirteenth century, a book was written, in a language known today as Mongolian. It told the life story of the man known as Temüjin who was given the title of Chingis Khan. He came from the steppe tribes who lived at the source of broad, shallow rivers, two of which flow to the northeast, joining the Amur flowing into the Pacific while the third flows north into Lake Baikal. The region is located in the northern provinces of a political state known as Outer Mongolia at the turn of the twentieth century, then as the Mongolian People’s Republic, and today as Mongolia. During the seven decades of Temüjin’s life, he and his allies organized the tribes of the region into a single military force, whose leaders, members of his immediate family and clan, became the Il-Khan rulers of Islamic Persia (Iran) and Iraq, lords of the Tartar rulers of Russia and Ukraine, emperors of the Yüan Dynasty in China, and the khans of Mongolia. This written book was the property of the ruling family and was never duplicated in a public form. Two books written during the period of the Mongol Empire hint at its existence by making reference to its stories. Both books, The History of the World Conqueror by Ata-Malik Juvaini and Collection of Histories by Rashid al-Din, written by Persians who served in the Mongol administration, contain detailed accounts of the origins and lives of the first generations of Mongol rulers. For centuries these Persian books were copied in the Islamic courts from Turkey to India. The Ming regained political and military control of China in the late fourteenth century. Following Chinese tradition, they wrote the history of the previous dynasty. They also created materials to train Chinese officials in Mongolian. Mongolian and Chinese are unrelated languages, with completely different writing systems, grammar, and little common vocabulary. A copy of the book about Chingis Khan, presumably in the Uighur script which the Mongols adopted to write their language, remained in Chinese

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hands after the transition of power. Scholars at the College of Literature created a copy of the book, written in Chinese, which consisted of three parallel texts: Chinese characters transcribing the sounds of Mongolian, a Chinese translation of each word or phrase, and a Chinese summary of each passage. The Chinese copy was given the title Yüan pi-shih meaning “The History of the Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty”. The same group of scholars produced a Mongolian-Chinese language training manual. In the first decade of the fifteenth century, both the Chinese copy and the training manual were copied once again into a larger encyclopedia. The title of the book was changed to Yüan ch’ao pi-shih, meaning “The Secret History of the Yüan Dynasty”. This copy survived in both manuscript and printed editions held privately by Chinese scholars and in the Imperial Library. From the fifteenth until the late nineteenth Century, knowledge of the book was limited to Chinese intellectual circles, where it was a curiosity that attracted a few devoted scholars, perhaps akin to the rare Aztec codices that survived in Spain. Essays by William Hung (“The Transmission…” 1951, see p. 9 below) and Francis Woodman Cleaves (“The Secret History…” Introduction, 1982 [1956], quoted below) give us a glimpse of how and when the book was read and copied by historians and book collectors during the Qing Dynasty. In each case, the Chinese scholar notes that the book contains information not found in the official Yüan history which should be of interest to historians. Cleaves translated a typical remark by Ch’ien Ta-hsin, written in the eighteenth century: Yüan T’ai-tsu [Chingis Khan] was the creator of an empire, yet the account of his deeds in the Yüan History is very careless and contradictory. Only the narrative in the Secret History seems to come closer to the truth, yet its language is vulgar and uncouth, not having had the benefit of polishing by a literary person. Hence, those who know [of] it[s existence are] few. It is very regrettable! [Cleaves, Introduction, p. xxxiv] The language of the book was not literary by Chinese standards. Indeed many of the events and actions described were outside the boundaries of Chinese taste. Here is an example from the English translation by Igor de Rachewiltz which illustrates just how “vulgar and uncouth” the text can be. Chingis Khan (Temüjin) has arrested his younger brother, Qasar, on suspicion of plotting to seize power. Their mother, a woman now in her 60s, rides into the camp in a horsedrawn cart to confront her eldest son, soon to be remem-

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bered by posterity as the Conqueror of the World: The mother was furious. As soon as she got there and dismounted from the cart, she herself untied and loosened Qasar’s sleeves, the opening of which had been tied up, and gave back to Qasar his hat and belt. The mother was so angered that she was unable to contain her fury. She sat cross-legged, took out both her breasts, laid them over her knees and said, ‘Have you seen them? They are the breasts that suckled you, and these are the ones who, rushing out of my womb, Have snapped at their own afterbirth, Have cut their own birth cord. What has Qasar done? Temüjin used to drain this one breast of mine. Qači’un and Otčigin [younger siblings] between them did not drain a single breast. As for Qasar, he completely drained both my breasts and brought me comfort until my bosom relaxed.’ [de Rachewiltz, p. 169] This kind of physical detail was quite alien to Chinese taste. But the intimacy of the scene (we are there) and the directness of the speech (the mother is speaking directly to her sons) is fundamental to the style of the book. There is evidence that portions of the book were incorporated in other books known and circulated in Mongolian during this period, but unknown in Chinese intellectual circles. Eventually, international political and social dynamics – Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and European – brought the book to the attention of a non-Chinese audience. The Re-Discovery In the first decade of the twentieth century, explorers, archeologists and linguists from Russia, British India, France, Germany, and Japan were active in China and the border region known at the time as Russian Turkistan, Chinese Turkistan, and Outer Mongolia. They were motivated by a mixture of nationalistic competition, scientific discovery, military intelligence, and religious mission. Both scholars and Christian missionaries were studying the native languages of the “minority” groups living on the borders of the British-Russian-Chinese Empires. The region, accessible along its margins thanks to new railroads, was being explored and mapped to prepare for possible military confrontations. British, French, German and Russian archeologists were excavating sites that had been ignored for centuries. Inscriptions and fragments of writing in known and previously unknown languages were found among the paintings, sculptures, cloth fragments and daily objects being packed Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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and shipped to London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg for further examination in national libraries and museums. The sites being excavated pre-dated the Mongolian Empire, and the book about the life of Chingis Khan was not among the buried treasures found. It was to be found in libraries and private collections of the Chinese capital, Beijing. In 1872 a member of the Russian religious mission, Archimandrite Palladii (Palladius), found a copy. He was the author of the first Chinese-Russian dictionary, but he knew no Mongolian. So he translated the Chinese summary into Russian, and this text was published by A.M. Pozdneev in 1880 in Russia. In the hundred-plus years that followed this first opening, The Secret History of the Mongols was “known” in the West, but there were seven factors that kept the book largely unknown to all but a few scholars: 1. To translate the book into a modern European language, the translator must know both Chinese and Mongolian. Knowledge of Mongolian alone is not sufficient, as there is no surviving copy of the “original” Mongolian book in the Uighur script. 2. The Mongolian to be translated is Old Mongolian, a vernacular language of the thirteenth century. The book itself is the key to that language, as The Secret History is the single large work that survives in Old Mongolian. 3. The Chinese translation and summary does not include all the words in the book. Individual words and many place names are obscure. Knowledge of the Altaic family of languages related to Mongolian is the key to understanding these words. 4. The form of the Chinese copy is not clear. The scribes and printers divided the book into numbered paragraphs and volumes which appear more related to the physical form of a Chinese book than to the text itself. It appears to have been altered from its original form but there is no explanation of how, why or when these alterations were made. The Secret History ends with sections describing events during the reign of Ögödei, Chingis Khan’s son and first successor, and these sections may or may not have been part of the original book. 5. Many of the contemporary sources that could be used to explain or verify obscure passages are in Persian, a language that is unrelated to Chinese or Mongolian. Very few scholars are familiar with all three languages.

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6. The Secret History does not fit clearly into any larger body of literature since it is neither epic poetry, nor folklore, nor fiction. Some passages are obviously alliterative poetry, intended to be recited, but most of the text seems to be narrative prose. While it tells the story of a national hero, it does not have the form of the medieval European heroic epics such as La Chanson de Roland or Cantar del Mio Cid. There are no similar works with which it can be easily compared. Later examples of Mongolian literature, re-discovered only in the last century, are separated from it by hundreds of years and major changes in cosmology and style. 7. The Secret History is not entirely a work of history, as that term is defined by contemporary Persian and Chinese histories or later European works. The description of people and events outside of Mongolia is vague and inaccurate and it contains many details about military events that took place in China and Persia that are contradicted by sources from other historical traditions. All this being the case, very few scholars could translate The Secret History. Such a scholar must be an expert in Old Mongolian and YĂźan Chinese, with a linguistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s understanding of the former to evaluate etymologies of obscure terms. Until translations of the major contemporary works recently appeared in English and Russian, a reading knowledge of Persian was required. Comprehensive and critical knowledge of the history of the period is essential, but because of the perceived historical inaccuracies it contains, Western historians have shown as much disinterest in the book as earlier Chinese scholars. Literary issues were not a factor, as a field of study of any larger body of Mongolian literature and culture outside of Mongolia, separate from Mongolian linguistics, did not exist. Academics who study Mongolian language, history and culture are called Mongolists. During the period of the Soviet Union, they could be divided into two groups: firstly, academics inside the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, USSR, China and Mongolia itself and secondly a group of Western academics in the US, Europe, and Japan, who had little or no access to Mongolia itself or to sources within their region of study. This division was reality, but it was also porous. Interactions between the German, Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese states during World War II caused a migration of important scholars to the West. Russians who collaborated with the German invasion of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and Mongols disPaul Kahn | Collected Essays

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placed by Stalin’s ethnic policies came to the United States. During the same period, the Japanese supported an ill-fated nationalist movement among Mongols inside China. When the People’s Republic of China was created in 1949, Mongols involved in this movement fled first to Taiwan and later to Europe and the US. In the Mongolian Autonomous Region (Inner Mongolia), the cult of Chingis Khan was carefully controlled by the Chinese government. At the same time, the negative image of Chingis Khan in Soviet ideology played an important role in suppressing the work of a generation of academics in the Mongolian People’s Republic. The Secret History of the Mongols in English By the 1930s, The Secret History of the Mongols had become the focus of scholarly translations in German, French, and English. A printed edition of the Chinese copy was produced by The Commercial Press in Beijing in 1933. It was generally considered to be a linguistic task of enormous proportions to translate this book. Old Mongolian had to be reconstructed from the Chinese text and then decoded by scientific linguistic techniques. The first European scholars involved were Erich Haenisch, whose work was published in German (in 1941 during World War II), and the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, whose incomplete translation was published in French after his death in 1948. At the same time, Father Antoine Mostaert, a Belgian Catholic missionary in Chinese Mongolia, and Francis Woodman Cleaves, an American who later became a professor of Chinese and Mongolian language at Harvard, were working on the text. Cleaves had studied with Pelliot in Paris before going to Beijing, where he met Mostaert. The Belgian priest had become an expert in Mongolian language as part of his missionary role in Inner Mongolia. Returning to Harvard after the war, Cleaves corresponded with Mostaert and both men devoted much of their lives to publications about Old Mongolian inscriptions and texts. Mostaert wrote and published commentaries and partial translations of The Secret History in French while Cleaves prepared an English translation of the text from Old Mongolian. That translation was complete in the early 1950s, set in type by 1956, but not published in book form. The Cleaves translation, copies of which had been circulating in the 1950s, was described as Volume I, with the second volume to be his commentary. This second volume, which would have completed the project, did not exist when the translation was completed. In the early 1970s, Igor de Rachewiltz began to publish an English translation and commentary in serial form in an Australian journal, Papers on Far Eastern History. De

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Rachewiltz was a linguist and teacher at the Australian National University who was fluent in both Old Mongolian and Yüan Chinese. Meanwhile, complete scholarly translations of The Secret History of the Mongols appeared in Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Modern Mongolian and Modern Chinese. FW Cleaves and P Kahn In 1978, I happened to read the Ronald Latham translation of The Travels of Marco Polo in a Penguin paperback. Reading this well-known story of the Italian who served the court of Kublai Khan reminded me of two things: 1) People used to call me “Kubla” in school 2) I didn’t really know anything about the Mongols. I was an American with a degree in English Literature and no reading knowledge of any other language, working as a catalog editor at Harvard University. I began to read books about the Mongolian Empire to be found at the Weidner Library including H. Desmond Martin’s The Rise of Chingis Khan and his Conquest of North China, which contained quotations from The Secret History of the Mongols. This and other books indicated that the quotations were from an English translation by Francis Woodman Cleaves, published by Harvard University Press. but this was not listed in the library catalog, still in the form of file cards in boxes. I went to the Harvard Yenching Institute, at that time the home of both the university’s East Asian Library and the department of East Asian Languages and Literature. I asked the secretary where I might find a copy of the book. She said, “Why don’t you ask Professor Cleaves?” and pointed to an office at the end of the hallway. I knocked on the door, introduced myself to Cleaves, and asked about the book. Cleaves reached into a leather briefcase beside his chair and handed me a set of photocopied pages held together with a clip. We agreed that I would make a photocopy for myself and return this one in a few days. Making another photocopy took much less time than the earlier Chinese transmissions, when a bibliophile would find a book in a friend’s library and arrange for a manuscript copy to be made for his own collection. Cleaves had given me a photocopy of page proofs for the book (Volume I, Translation) which was the source of the quotations found in other books published since the 1950s. I was struck by the curious style Cleaves had chosen for his translation. Each sentence was an almost literal rendering of the Mongolian grammar and connective phrases that were implied but not stated in the Mongolian were inserted in brackets. The English vocabulary was intentionally archaic, as Cleaves explained in Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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his Introduction, modeled directly on the vocabulary of the King James Bible. A typical line reads: Because [in serving the women] they also poured [the content of] one pitcher beginning at Ebegei, the “little mother” of Sača Beki, both Qorijin Qatun and Qu’urči Qatun saying, [each unto herself,] “How pour they, not beginning at me, but beginning at Ebergei?,” smote the cook Šiki’ür. [Cleaves, pp. 60-61] The resulting translation was very difficult to read. However, the story was not difficult to follow, and a number of narrative features reminded me of texts I had been reading and working with for several years. The poetry I read, edited, and wrote myself were all strongly influenced by folklore and oral traditions. Before taking the job at Harvard, I had been managing editor of Alcheringa:ethnopoetics, a journal devoted to translation of oral literature. One Alcheringa editor was Dennis Tedlock, an American anthropologist who had created pioneering translations of Zuni oral narratives in the form of dramatic poetry rather then conventional prose. The other editor was Jerome Rothenberg, an American poet and anthologist who had written free translations of many texts he could not read in the original language, which he called “workings”. Cleaves was very careful to mark the repetition of formulas and descriptive passages in the text, a style found in most oral traditions. While his translation had no detailed commentary, it had ample footnotes which often explained un-translated terms or concepts. About one third of the text was translated as verse, a feature established by earlier European translators, but not visible in the Chinese summary. I began to re-write the story of a battle scene, and then a larger section. I chose an American vocabulary and a narrative verse form. The parts of the text which were identified as verse by Cleaves and others worked well in this format. I broke the non-verse passages into lines that reflected the rhythm of the narrative. I decided that it would be easier to read, on the page and aloud, if the difference between verse and non-verse in the original was ignored. It was an unscientific liberty to take with a text that I could not read in the original. I was “translating” a text for the readers of American English. I made heavy use of several other books as I methodically wrote a new book from Cleaves’ translation. Conqueror of the World, a biography of Chingis Khan by René Grousset, a French historian who used Pelliot’s translation as his source, had been translated into English. Grousset provided many detailed descriptions of the landscape in

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which the action takes place. John Andrew Boyle, a British professor of Persian Studies, had translated Juvaini’s History of the World Conqueror, and this and other works by Boyle provided an Islamic context for the events. I found Igor de Rachewiltz’s translation and commentaries in the Western language periodicals collections of the Harvard Yenching Library. Both this translation, which was much easier to read, and the commentaries, which provided far more information than Cleaves’ footnotes, were a valuable source for untangling obscure passages. My book was finished in 1980. I had shown sections to Cleaves, who offered no objections or corrections. When a publisher was found, I showed the completed book to Cleaves along with the publisher’s letter asking for permission to describe the book as an adaptation based on his translation. Cleaves responded to the request by stating that the publication of my book was impossible until his own book was published. There were several reasons why Cleaves’ translation remained un-published in 1980. It was well known that many English-speaking scholars in the small world of Mongolian studies had a negative opinion of the style and strategy Cleaves had taken, so publication was expected to create negative reviews in the scholarly journals. The fact that Cleaves had not yet written the promised second volume of commentary would be more apparent when Volume One was published. But both of these reasons may have been secondary to a conflict of a personal and scholarly nature, which dated from 1951. In that year, William Hung, a Chinese scholar and professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Harvard, published his essay, “The Transmission of the book known as The Secret History of the Mongols” in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. This article described in meticulous detail the history of the Chinese copy book in which the text of The Secret History had been preserved. In addition to establishing where, when and by whom each of the Chinese copies was made, Hung presented his conclusion concerning the controversial question of when the original Mongolian book had been written. Dates in the book are recorded using the twelve-year animal cycle. Hung concluded that the Year of the Rat mentioned at the end of the book corresponded to 1268 A.D. The Introduction to Cleaves’ translation makes extensive use of Hung’s scholarship, quoting and citing his work in dozens of places, but on the question of dating the book Cleaves did not agree. This difference of opinion became a major factor in his decision to keep his translation unpublished. In Cleaves’ own words: It was my dear friend and [Chinese characters for Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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“teacher”], William Hung, who was responsible for what happened. … Because William had written a paper, as you know, on The Secret History, he forbad me to publish in my “Introduction” anything that was contrary to his conclusions. [quoted from a letter from Cleaves to Igor de Rachewiltz, 7 March 1992, de Rachewiltz, Introduction, p. cv, fn. 312] The final paragraph of Cleaves’ Introduction starts to deal with this issue, and then abruptly stops: It is hardly an exaggeration to state that, since the time when the Archimandrite Palladiĭ expressed his views on the dating of the Mongolian text of The Secret History, although the problem has been considered by a number of scholars, it does not seem that any substantial progress has been made in the matter of its solution. While there has been a tendency to date the text later and later, with the result that the suggested dates of its composition now range from the years 1228 to 1264, the grounds for later dating have become increasingly hypothetical. [Cleaves, Introduction, p. lxv] Yet, in the final paragraph of Cleaves’ translation, he inserts his own conclusion: [We] finished writing at the moment when the Great Assembly was assembled and [when], in the year of the rat [1228], in the moon of the dam, the palaces were pitched at Dolo’an Boldaγ of Köde’e Aral of the Kelüren, between both Šilgin Čeg and … [Cleaves, p. 228] To use an American colloquial idiom, Cleaves was between a rock and a hard place. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In 1980, William Hung died at the age of 87. The combination of Hung’s death, my request to publish my own version, and the insistence by friends that Cleaves publish his translation before my book appeared, convinced Cleaves to allow the book to be printed. The Secret History of the Mongols, For the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary, Volume I (Translation) by Francis Woodman Cleaves was published by Harvard University Press in 1982. The book was published in a small edition and went out of print. The anticipated negative reviews appeared. Now in his 70s, Cleaves retired to his farm in New Hampshire but when his student and

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successor at Harvard, Joseph Fletcher, died, he returned part time to teach Mongolian. Francis Cleaves died in 1995, at the age of 84, without completing his volume of commentary. The Secret History of the Mongols, the Origin of Chingis Khan, an adaptation by Paul Kahn appeared two years later from North Point Press. The book was published in an inexpensive format and went through a first and second printing before the publisher went out of business. A second edition of the book was published by Cheng & Tsui in 1998, with the help of one of Cleaves’ former students. FW Cleaves and I de Rachewiltz From the time of its first appearance, the translation of and commentary about The Secret History of the Mongols by Igor de Rachewiltz has been the most extensive scholarly work in English concerning the subject. However, it would remain unpublished in book form for two decades. Cleaves and de Rachewiltz maintained a polite and respectful distance during Cleaves’ lifetime. Cleaves was in New England and did not attend international conferences. De Rachewiltz worked in Canberra, Australia. In fact, the two men did not disagree on the most substantial issues concerning the text, and de Rachewiltz states (in letters quoted in his Introduction) that he found Cleaves’ linguistic scholarship, an issue that was never seriously questioned, extremely valuable. In the Preface, de Rachewiltz states that he began his translation in 1968, at the urging of several prominent Mongolists who felt that Cleaves’ translation, whatever its merits or failures, was not likely to be published. By the time Cleaves’ book appeared in 1982, de Rachewiltz’ work was largely completed. The translation and commentary were published between 1971 and 1985 and it was immediately obvious that this was the most comprehensive work ever. At the same time, published in serial form in a relatively obscure journal, it was among the most unavailable. That issue of availability is now resolved. The Secret History of the Mongols, A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, translated with a historical and philological commentary, by Igor de Rachewiltz has finally been published by Brill in The Netherlands in this first decade of the twenty-first century. The translation fills 218 pages. The Preface, Introduction, Commentaries, Appendices, Bibliography and Index occupy another 1,200 pages. The format is hardly a popular edition – two large volumes of 1,400 pages costing over $200 – but that format is entirely appropriate for its intended audience: libraries and specialists in the field. The Introduction states that the translation in the book Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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does not differ from the original journal publications. Igor de Rachewiltz’ style is clear and largely transparent, as is already apparent from the passage quoted above. This next is another good example, one of a series of praise songs Chingis Khan offers to members of his inner group shortly after his election. Here he is praising Boroqul, one of four men adopted as a child by his mother: On the bare ground she found you, In other people’s camps. She placed you close to her legs, She treated you as her own sons And brought you up with care; She stretched your necks And made you into adults; She stretched your shoulders And made you into men. She surely brought you up in order to make you the companions of her sons. Who knows how many favours and services you have returned to my mother for the favour of having brought you up! [de Rachewiltz, pp. 145-146] In passages like this one, the rhythm of both the language and the thought unite, without recourse to footnotes. We understand the details of a nomadic culture – she placed you close to her legs, she stretched your necks – in which the metaphorical raising of animal (horses, cattle, sheep, camels) and human companions are intertwined. At the same time, the vocabulary de Rachewiltz chooses is clearly constrained by his responsibility as a linguist and the legacy of the earlier English translations. In an earlier praise sequence for another commander, Chingis Khan describes how his warriors manifest his will through their actions: — when I sent you off, directing you to the place I had in mind, When I said, “Reach there!”, You crushed the stones to be there; When I said, “Attack!”, You split up the rocks, You shattered the shining stones, You cleft the deep waters. [de Rachewiltz, p. 142] Rocks and shining stones do not seem to carry the grandeur and contrast that the passage calls for. In the phrase “cleft the deep waters” we have an echo of the archaisms that so plague the Cleaves translation. It is difficult to tell whether

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we should hear this phrase as grand or simply old fashioned. It is clear that de Rachewiltz waited another twenty years to publish his book in order to revise his major work, the Commentary. By sheer weight as well as erudition, it is a tour de force. Even as the first sections were appearing in the Papers on Far Eastern History, one could see that the Commentary was growing as the translator progressed through the book. By the time of its first completion in 1985, the number of scholarly articles on related subjects had grown enormously, and continued to increase in the 1990s as the isolation of scholarship and political prohibitions against the subject inside the former Communist countries dissolved. The Secret History of the Mongols has been discussed extensively (reading west to east) in English, French, German, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Mongolian, Kazakh, Buriat, Oirat, Kalmuck, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, and translated in some of these languages not once but several times. De Rachewiltz has read all the translations, along with the related scholarship (he apologizes for not reading Korean). The resulting Commentary is even-handed and encyclopedic. His method is to explain his choice of words, seriously consider all sides to every question, offer his opinion and, in some cases, draw a conclusion. The scene in which Chingis Khan (Temüjin) separates his camp from his current ally, Jamuqa, is a good illustration of de Rachewiltz’ method. As the passage begins, the two leaders are moving with their camps: Temüjin and Jamuqa went together in front of the carts, and as they proceeded Jamuqa said, ‘Sworn friend, sworn friend Temüjin, Let us camp near the mountain: There will be enough shelter For our horse-herders! Let us camp near the river: There will be enough food For our shepherds and lamb-herds!’ Temüjin could not understand these words of Jamuqa and remained silent. Falling behind, he waited for the carts in the middle of the moving camp – for it was a moving camp – then Temüjin said to Mother Hö’elün, ‘Sworn friend Jamuqa said, “Let us camp near the mountain: There will be enough shelter For our horse-herders! Let us camp near the river: There will be enough food For our shepherds and lamb-herds!” I couldn’t understand these words of his, so I did not Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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give him any answer and decided to come and ask you, mother.’ Before Mother Hö’elün could utter a sound, Lady Börte said, ‘Sworn friend Jamuqa, so they say, grows easily tired of his friends. Now the time has come when he has grown tired of us. The words which sworn friend Jamuqa has spoken just now are, therefore, words alluding to us. Let us not pitch camp, but while we are on the move, let us separate completely from him and move further on, traveling at night!’ This, then is what she said. [de Rachewiltz, pp. 45-46] Lady Börte, Temüjin’s first wife and mother of the sons who would inherit the empire, states her interpretation, and the camp, along with the story, moves on. This passage, one of the most important in the narrative, is a good test of the Commentary. How is this piece of verse with its parallel structure, which the narrative’s main character does not understand, to be explained? And why do the characters react the way they do? De Rachewiltz devotes three pages of commentary to this. He begins with a linguistic justification for his choice of the word shelter in the first couplet of the mysterious statement, for which he cites seven different sources. Then he provides similar treatment for several other individual words, because “[t] his is important to understand Jamuqa’s apparently cryptic utterances…” He follows this with a reference to another cryptic utterance by another important character earlier in the narrative. Thus far, he has done what a linguistic scholar is meant to do, accumulating references meaningful to other linguistic scholars, and pointing out textual parallels. From there he moves on to interpretation: It is clear that Jamuqa is offering Temüjin a choice: either to pitch camp on the wooded mountainside, where the horse-herders would be better off since they would be able to build themselves shelters with bark and twigs, or to pitch camp along the river, where the shepherds would find better grazing for their animals. On the face of it, Jamuqa’s question is anything but an idle one; on the contrary, it must have been dictated by a practical exigency. What may have puzzled Temüjin and made him suspect an ulterior motive, was the way Jamuqa put the question and the fact that he left the choice to him, ostensibly the junior partner. It was, however, Börte who, with her sudden intervention

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(she did not even give Hö’elün the chance to express her opinion), fanned Temüjin’s suspicions and was actually responsible for his decision to abandon his partner. [de Rachewiltz, p.441] We can hear de Rachewiltz actually speaking here, with all the typographic emphasis (the italics and underlining are all his) added to help us hear his voice. He continues summarizing an argument made by Owen Lattimore, ending with the appropriate citation. Then his voice returns: But one should not overlook, viz. the ‘riddle’ element in Jamuqa’s question (note that in the SH account the words are in alliterative poetry!), a riddle that Temüjin admits he ‘couldn’t understand’. Börte’s words, too, indicate that she could not understand the meaning of the words, but she believed they concealed a scheme against Temüjin, hence her reaction. If neither Temüjin nor his wife could understand Jamuqa’s poetic riddle, what hope have we, who are so far removed from the culture, to understand what was the real meaning of those words? I am of the opinion that the story of Jamuqa’s cryptic utterances and Börte’s interference is nothing but the post eventum, ‘official’ justification for what was, in effect, Temüjin’s callous betrayal of his sworn friend and ally. He used this technique throughout his career, as amply shown by the SH, and we need not be deceived by poetic riddles. The separation from Jamuqa was no doubt due to Temüjin’s ambition to gain supremacy – as a leader in his own right – over the subtribes and clans that owed allegiance to the Mongol (=Mongqol) tribe, as subsequent events will show. However, it seems that the actual rupture of the friendly relations between the two andas [the word translated above as ‘sworn friend’] was somehow engineered by Temüjin’s senior relatives Altan and Qučar, who were at the time in Jamuqa’s camp (see § 127). The exact circumstance (and backstage machinations) which culminated in the break-up will never be known and we can only make a guess on the basis of the available source material, much of which is tendentious. This paragraph has caused a good deal of controversy among ideologically motivated scholars and different interpretations have been put forth (some of them patently spurious) which have further coloured – and clouded – the issue. [de Rachewiltz, pp. 441-442] Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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In conclusion to this, he adds over a dozen citations to arguments made by other writers. We can see here several aspects of de Rachewiltz’ technique. He is thorough in the technical explanation of his choice of words in the translation. He is aware of the literary features of the book, which includes quotations of sayings and formulas considered ancient at the time the book was written. He can recognize a riddle when he sees one, perhaps influenced by, but not citing, various Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic examples. He will readily admit his lack of understanding of a culture which exists, after all, only in the text, albeit a text that he knows as well as any man. He does not pretend to be a medieval Mongol. He has no sympathy for what he considers to be “ideological” interpretations, a reference to various orthodox Marxist interpretations of the characters’ motivations and actions. And finally, he has his own opinion, which is found in direct statement rather than citation. We can read his translation with or without agreeing to be “deceived by a poetic riddle”. De Rachewiltz is careful to show that his choice of words is based on the language of the text and not on his interpretation. Then by reading the Commentary we can certainly see where the translator stands on the issue. His opinion, that the story is told thus to justify later actions between Temüjin and various tribal factions, suggests something fundamental about the book we are reading – that it was carefully written for a purpose. Whether or not we share his belief that Temüjin’s subsequent actions can be described as the “callous betrayal of his sworn friend and ally”, we have to consider that the writer was calculating the effect his story would have on its audience. To accept this, we need to believe that someone wrote the book with a specific audience in mind. The Three (Plus Two) Big Questions and Answers The three questions that previous scholars and translators have sought to answer are: where was the book written, when was it written, and who wrote it. Each has provoked serious controversy. In the Introduction, de Rachewiltz summarizes the various arguments that have been put forward and then states his opinion or conclusion: where: de Rachewiltz identifies the place named at the end of the text as a specific location in the current Xentii Aimag (Khentey province) in the northern part of present Mongolia. when: de Rachewiltz agrees with Cleaves and several other scholars that the date of composition was the Year of

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the Rat in 1228, one year after Chingis Khan’s death. However, the last few sections describe events that took place up to a decade after this date, during the reign of Ögödei. By choosing 1228, de Rachewiltz agrees with other scholars that these last sections were added to the book at a later date. who is a different question. The location and date of composition are stated in the final paragraph, but there is no statement in the book that directly identifies the author. Here the arguments are speculative and deductive. De Rachewiltz eliminates several historical figures that others have favored. He names Šigi Qutuqu, another adopted son in Chingis Khan’s immediate family, based on a summary of arguments by a broad range of previous scholars. This also agrees with statements made by Cleaves. But this he qualifies as an opinion, “for want of any solid and convincing evidence, we can only make an educated guess in the matter, without absolutely ruling out certain of the other personages discussed above.” [de Rachewiltz, p. xl] Speculation on the who question leads to the equally speculative, but perhaps more significant question of why the book was written at all. From the point of view of a linguist, this question does not have to be answered. The text exists to be studied as a record of the language, and that language is the same, regardless of the author’s intention. But if we are to understand what the book meant to the author and his intended audience, we need some concept of why it was written. This leads to the question of genre: is The Secret History of the Mongols to be considered literature, history or a group of tales compiled by a committee? This is a crucial question because, as already stated, the book has been neglected in the field of World Literature largely because it has no obvious context, being in an obscure language with no literary precedent or successor. Clearly, de Rachewiltz thinks the book is coherent and survives today in the form in which it was originally written. He provides a strong answer to both the why and genre questions in his Introduction, and reinforces his conclusions throughout his Commentary. As stated in his subtitle, he considers it an epic chronicle. In the Introduction, he summarizes various previous arguments on the subject and then states his own conclusion: Summing up we can safely state, I think, that the Secret History is, indeed, an epic chronicle rather than an heroic epic, aimed at recording not only the deeds and pronouncements of Chinggis Qan, but also those of his faithful companions in a language and style that reflect the attitudes and values of contemporary Mongols. It Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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is at the same time a glorification of the conqueror’s clan for the sake of posterity, especially of his immediate successors, and the mere fact that it was put down in writing so soon after his death (in the form which it still largely retains) indicates, in my view, that it was also meant to serve as a guide and instruction, not just as a plain record or entertainment. [de Rachewiltz, Introduction, p.lxix] His conclusion is unequivocal and complex. The book is history, serving as a record of actual people and events. It is epic in scope, joining the story of a man, his contemporaries and the diverse nations they united, which nations were the nomadic cultures, not the sedentary Chinese and Islamic cultures they fought against. The members of its intended audience were the families who would carry on the cultural transformation for centuries. With this in mind, we can better understand why it is a book worth reading, in any language. Its uniqueness enables us to hear the voice of a culture that contemporary accounts could barely hear, and that later historians would largely ignore. While every linguistic puzzle has not been solved, one hopes that de Rachewiltz’s book can now free The Secret History from a century of linguistic study and reveal it to a general audience. The book is a unique self-description of forces that created a thirteenth century Eurasia where cultural, religious, artistic and commercial influences mixed from the shores of China and Korea to Iran, Iraq and across Russia into Poland and the shores of Adriatic Europe. It could be argued, though not yet by tenured faculty, that the successor states of forces set in motion were the very cultures – Manchu China, Czarist Russia, Imperial Japan, the Ottoman states and the European Colonial Empires – that faced each other around the unmapped void of Central Asia in the beginning of the twentieth century, just when the book was re-discovered. Perhaps twenty-first century readers, a new audience living in a new world, can learn something by listening to this voice. Note concerning names I have tried to use the spelling of place names and persons used by de Rachewiltz and Cleaves, within the limits of the character sets at my disposal. Along with my own habit of using Pinyin for Chinese names, this produces a mixture of transcription systems. When not directly quoting either author, I have used Chingis Khan rather than Chinggis Qan, the spelling favored by de Rachewiltz, simply out of personal preference.

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Introduction to “The Secret History of the Mongols”

Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, edited by Honeychurch, Fitzhugh and Rossabi, Genghis Khan Exhibits, 2009, pp. 117-123

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Origins of the “Secret History” Sometime during the first half of the thirteenth century an extraordinary literary event took place. The life story of the man who came to be known as Genghis Khan was written down in the language he would have spoken. Born with the name Temujin, he had come from a culture that thrived on the steppe to the north of China, to the east of the Christian and Islamic worlds. During the seven decades of Temujin’s life, he and his descendents organized the steppe peoples of this region into a single military force whose leaders were to become the Khans of Central Asia, the Ilkhanid rulers of what we know today as the Middle East, the Golden Horde of Russia and the Ukraine, and the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty in China. This literary event was the first text to be composed in the Mongolian language. Its composition marked the transition from oral to written tradition in a bio-geographical region where human culture had thrived without written literature for thousands of years. The peoples of north and central Asia had been in continuous contact with literate cultures, and several preceding cultures in the same bioregion, notably the Uyghur Turks, had developed their own forms of writing. But the impetus for this manuscript was not merely contact with other writing systems; the new element was the motivation, perhaps even the necessity to record recent events in their own language in a written form. The story told in the book is extraordinary because of its immediacy. In Homer’s Iliad, the legends of Alexander the Great, or the Sagas of Icelanders, the adventures of cultural heros are recorded centuries after the events themselves occurred. But in this case, the stories seem to have been written down within a few decades, and by an author familiar with the events. Details of steppe life are rendered with intimate detail, and men and women directly express their feelings and thoughts. The way of telling the story is shaped by frequent use of parallelism and repetition, both well known techniques of oral storytelling. Events occur in groups of three. Characters justify their actions by repeating entire passages found earlier in the text. Attributes of characters

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are described in pairs, for example, Börte’s introduction as “a girl whose face filled with light, / whose eyes filled with fire” (Kahn p.15), itself an inversion of an earlier description of Temujin himself. Formulas used to describe a character are frequently repeated with slight variation each time the character appears. By capturing the form of oral literature in writing, the story from 800 years ago speaks to us directly. Evidence suggests that this book was the property of the Mongol ruling family and was never intended to be viewed outside the inner court. Two Iranian histories, written during the Mongol Empire period, hint at the book’s existence by making reference to its stories. The History of the World Conqueror by Ata-Malik Juvaini and A Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din were available in Mongol Iran and later copied in Islamic courts from Turkey to India, transmitting detailed accounts of the origins and lives of the first generations of Mongol rulers. But no copy of the Mongol source from which these Iranian books quote survived in the Islamic world. In the late fourteenth century the Han Chinese regained political and military control over their own land and forced the Mongol ruling class back to their homeland in the north. A copy of the Mongolian book about Genghis Khan, presumably written in the script adapted from the Uyghur alphabet, remained in Chinese libraries after the transition of power. Following Chinese tradition, scholars of the newly established Ming dynasty compiled the Yuanshi, the history of the previous dynasty drawn primarily from Chinese sources. Because Mongolian and Chinese are unrelated languages, with completely different writing systems and grammar, as well as little common vocabulary, scholars from the College of Literature created training materials in the Mongolian language for Chinese diplomats. One of the texts they chose was what we know today as The Secret History (de Rachewiltz, p.xliv-xlv). The copy they created was written in Chinese characters and incorporated three parallel texts: Chinese characters transcribing the sounds of Mongolian words, a Chinese translation of each word or phrase, and a Chinese summary of each passage. The result was quite similar to the way anthropologists from the Bureau of American Ethnography produced transcripts of Native American tales in the early twentieth century—transcribing the sounds of the language, literally translating individual words, and then writing a summary of the meaning. The Chinese copy of the book was given the title Yuan bishi meaning “The History of the Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty.” The text was divided into 282 sections, arranged in 12 chapters. This organization seems to have more to do with the

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way the book was copied in Chinese than any divisions in the original text. The scribes and printers divided the book into numbered paragraphs and chapters. The same scholars from the College of Literature incorporated this into a MongolianChinese language training manual. In the first decade of the fifteenth century, both the Chinese copy and the training manual were copied once again into a larger encyclopedia. This copy survived in both manuscript and printed editions held privately by Chinese scholars and in the Imperial Library. The title of the book was changed to Yuanchao bi shih, meaning “The Secret History of the Yüan Dynasty.” The title was later reinterpreted by Western translators as “The Secret History of the Mongols.” From the fifteenth until the late nineteenth century, knowledge of the book was limited to Chinese intellectual circles, perhaps akin to the way rare Aztec codices are known only in the libraries of Spain. Its existence was a curiosity that attracted a few devoted readers. Chinese scholars who owned the book note repeatedly that it contained information that should be of interest to historians and is not to be found in the official history, the Yuanshi. Francis Woodman Cleaves translated a typical remark by the eighteenth century scholar, Qian Daxin: Yüan T’ai-tsu [Genghis Khan] was the creator of an empire, yet the account of his deeds in the Yuan History is very careless and contradictory. Only the narrative in the Secret History seems to come closer to the truth, yet its language is vulgar and uncouth, not having had the benefit of polishing by a literary person. Hence, those who know [of] it[s existence are] few. It is very regrettable! [Cleaves 1982 [1956], p. xxxiv] As Qian notes, a factor that contributed to the book’s obscurity was that many of the events and actions it described were outside the boundaries of Chinese taste. The following passage illustrates aspects of the text that the Chinese characterized as “vulgar and uncouth.” Höelün, mother of Genghis Khan and a woman in her sixties, rides into the camp in a cart drawn by a white camel to confront her eldest son, who has arrested his younger brother, Khasar, on suspicion of plotting to seize power. Höelün rode into the camp furious, lept from her cart, and the mother herself unbound Khasar’s sleeves, the sleeves Genghis Khan had just tied; the mother herself returned Khasar his hat and his belt, the hat and the belt Genghis Khan had just taken.

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Unable to control the anger she felt, Höelün sat down before Genghis, crossing her legs beneath her, brought out her two breasts from under her coat, lay them on her two knees, and cried: “Do you know these breasts? These are the breasts you sucked from! These are the source of your life, and like the mother of the wolf I ate the afterbirth, I cut the navel cord for you both. What could Khasar have done to deserve this? Temüjin could empty one of my breasts with his drinking, and Alchidai and Odchigin together couldn’t even empty one. But Khasar could drink all the milk from both breasts. He eased my pains and brought me rest. (Kahn, p. XX)

This kind of physical detail was as natural to Mongolian sensibilities as it was alien to Chinese taste. The intimacy of the scene (we are there) and the directness of the speech (the mother is speaking directly to her sons) are fundamental to the style of the book. The implied inner strength of a child who could empty one or both of a mother’s breasts is particularly Mongolian. The entire language of the story is an expression of Mongolian experience and thought. Images of predatory animals (wolves, panthers) and birds (eagles, falcons) are used to describe human actions, mothers are shown caring for their children as they care for sheep and horses, husbands and wives share each other’s resources, and blood or spiritual brothers defend each other’s lives. We learn that each man and woman has the obligation to defend the ruler of his/her tribe or clan. Betraying that ruler is an anti-social act punishable by death, and many examples are given to prove this point. But this loyalty is both absolute and transitory. Once a battle is over, each person is free to change allegiance. The defeat of one group by another certainly resulted in the death of some of the enemy, but victory is also portrayed as a form of redistribution, the absorption of one group by another. Former enemies who pledge allegiance to the victor after a proper fight are rewarded. Enemies who do not recognize redistribution, who flee and continue to resist, are dealt with ruthlessly. A woman’s loyalty, whether given in marriage by her parents or taken through abduction or warfare, is also to the victor. The quality of the people rather than the way in which a marriage begins determines the bond of loyalty between husband and wife.

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The Portrait of Genghis Khan The young Temujin, who becomes the mature military leader Genghis Khan, is the main focus of the book. He is portrayed as a human character with strengths and weaknesses. While many incidents in his early life suggest that he is protected or favored by spiritual forces, he is never portrayed as having supernatural powers. His strengths are stamina, determination, and shrewdness. He repeatedly demonstrates that he knows when to run, when to attack, when to make peace, and how to manipulate alliances to his own advantage. His appearance and his actions clearly inspire devotion. The text includes many stories about the men who chose to join him. These men come from all the strata of steppe culture, wealthy and poor, princes and foundlings, close kin and unrelated tribes. A common factor is that all the major characters are people of the steppe, horse nomads who live off their herds and the hunt. The assumption that any band of people benefits from having a strong leader is presented as a self-evident truth, introduced as a prologue in the tales of Mongol ancestors. The story demonstrates how Genghis Khan, his first wife BĂśrte and his loyal retainers embody and extend these principles of Mongol culture. Their actions bring peace and stability to a culture that seemed to thrive on and suffer from constant conflict driven by cycles of revenge. We see how Genghis Khan ends conflict by absorbing and redistributing the tribes into a Mongol nation, organized through complementary forms of hunting and military discipline, to be fed by constant expansion of territory, trade, and the rewards of conquest. In this peaceful world, all the spoils of hunting and warfare belong to the leader, who justly redistributes the wealth among his people. The story teaches us that Genghis Khan is a great ruler because he inspires his followers, he listens to good counsel, and he keeps his promises. He is always ready to face the next challenge to his leadership role, he acts decisively, and finally he succeeds. The fact that he is favored by Heaven is self-evident. It is both the cause and the result of his success as a leader and definer of a nation described as â&#x20AC;&#x153;these fields of tangled grasses.â&#x20AC;? The Rediscovery Today we know that some of the old Mongolian sources found in The Secret History of the Mongols were incorporated in later Mongolian texts, but these works were not read in Chinese intellectual circles and were unknown in Europe. International political and social dynamics at the start of the twentieth century finally brought the book to the attention Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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of a Chinese and non-Chinese audience. As the twentieth century began, explorers, archaeologists, linguists, and religious missionaries from Russia, British India, France, Germany, and Japan were active in China and the border regions then known as Russian Turkistan, Chinese Turkistan, and Outer Mongolia. All were motivated by a mixture of nationalistic competition, scientific discovery, military intelligence, and religious mission. Both secular scholars and Christian missionaries were studying the native languages of the non-Chinese groups living on the borders of the British-Russian-Chinese Empires. The region, newly accessible along its margins by railroad, was being explored and mapped to prepare for possible military confrontations. British, French, German, American and Russian archaeologists and explorers were excavating sites that had been ignored for centuries. Inscriptions and fragments of writing in known and previously unknown languages were found among the paintings, sculptures, cloth fragments, and objects of daily life. Hundreds of crates were being packed and shipped to London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg for further examination in national libraries and museums. Most of these archaeological sites predated the Mongolian Empire, and the book about the life of Genghis Khan was not among the treasures found buried in the sand. The book was in libraries and private collections of the Chinese capital, Beijing. In 1866 Archimandrite Palladiĭ (Palladius), a member of the Russian religious mission, became the first non-Chinese to find a copy. Palladiĭ could read Chinese but not Mongolian, so he translated the book’s Chinese summary into Russian. As a result of his work, the first European edition of the book was a Russian translation based on the Chinese summary of Chapter 1, published in St. Petersburg by A.M. Pozdneev in 1880. From that moment on, The Secret History of the Mongols was “injected into the bloodstream of Western scholarship,” (Cleaves, p. xix). However, it remained obscure until a full Chinese version was published in 1933 followed by the first translations into European languages in the 1940s. Once the Chinese text was available, several factors kept the book from being read by all but a few specialists. To translate the book into a modern language, the translator must know both Chinese and Mongolian. The Old Mongolian to be translated is a vernacular language of the thirteenth century, related but not identical to contemporary Mongolian. The Secret History itself is the key to that language, being the single large work from that period that survives. The task is further complicated because the

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scholars at the College of Literature left in place but did not translate words and place-names they did not understand. To understand these words, a translator must also possess knowledge of the Altaic family of languages related to Mongolian. Many of the fourteenth century sources that could be used to explain or verify obscure passages are in Iranian, a language that is unrelated to Chinese or Mongolian. Most of these sources remained untranslated into European languages until recently. In addition to the language challenges, the book was difficult to place in the context of any literary or historical tradition. Being in a language spoken by a few million people, with no literary precedent or successor, The Secret History does not fit clearly into any larger body of literature. It is not an epic poem, a work of fiction, or a cycle of tales. Some passages are alliterative poetry, intended to be recited, but much of the text seems to be narrative prose. While its subject is the life of a nation-builder, it does not resemble medieval romances such as La Chanson de Roland or Cantar del Mio Cid, both considered precursors to later European literature. If it’s place as literature has been unclear, its place as history has also been suspect. The Secret History does not fit the definition of history as that term is used by our own Greek-Roman-European tradition, nor by the standards of the Chinese or Islamic worlds. The description of people and events inside and outside of Mongolia contain many chronological details that are contradicted by Iranian or Chinese sources, leading many historians to question its value. Sections such as those describing the reign of Ögödei, Genghis Khan’s son and first successor, were probably not part of the original. The text we have appears to have been altered or added to during the Yuan period, but there is no clear evidence as to why or when these alterations were made. A printed edition of the Chinese copy was produced by The Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1933. Within a decade, The Secret History of the Mongols had become the focus of scholarly translations in German, French, and English. The first European scholars who dedicated themselves to the task were Erich Haenisch, whose work was published in German in 1948, and the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, whose incomplete translation was published in French after his death in the same year. Father Antoine Mostaert, a Belgian Catholic missionary in Inner Mongolia, and Francis Woodman Cleaves, an American who later became a professor of Chinese and Mongolian language at Harvard University, began similar work. The Cleaves English translation Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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(1982), copies of which had been circulating since the 1950s, is the primary source for my adaptation, The Secret History of the Mongols: The Origin of Chingis Khan (1984 [1998]), quoted in this chapter and throughout this volume. One recent English translation deserves special mention. Igor de Rachewiltz prepared a fine translation accompanied by a historical and philological commentary and devoted four decades to compiling a commentary on each passage. The result (2004) is perhaps the most complete scholarly work on the subject in any language, a veritable encyclopedia of the field. His introduction summarizes the various arguments put forward regarding when The Secret History was written and by whom. De Rachewiltz agrees with Cleaves and several other scholars that the date of composition was the Year of the Rat in 1228, one year after Genghis Khan’s death. By choosing 1228, de Rachewiltz agrees with other scholars that the last few sections, which describe events during the reign of Ögödei, were added to the text at a later date. To consider these passages about Ögödei later additions does not make them less interesting, but does give us a better sense of the shape of the original text, which ends at Genghis Khan’s death and contains no account of his funeral or the events that followed. The location and date of composition are stated in the final paragraph of the text as it was found, but there is no statement in the book that directly identifies the author. Therefore, any identification of the author is speculative and deductive. De Rachewiltz chooses Shigi Khutukhu as the author, a foundling adopted from the Tatar tribe into Genghis Khan’s immediate family, described in the book as chief judge and record keeper. De Rachewiltz’s decision is based on a summary of arguments by a broad range of previous scholars, including Cleaves. Speculation on who composed the book leads to the equally speculative, but perhaps more significant, question of why the book was written at all. To understand what the book meant to the author and his intended audience, we need some concept of motivation. Is The Secret History of the Mongols to be considered literary composition, a work of history, or a group of tales compiled by a committee? Why does some of the chronology not agree with Iranian and Chinese sources? Paul Ratchnevsky in his biography of Genghis Khan concludes, “The chronology of the Secret History is unreliable because the author considers the individual episodes of his epic to be more important than either their interrelation or correct chronological order.” (1983 [1991] p.61) To understand what the author did consider important, we

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must recognize that the book was written for posterity not as a chronology but as a cultural instruction to generations who would inherit a new political state. Its essential value was didactic, to transmit in a dramatic form the information it contains. The characters of the book explain their motivations very carefully each time they act. An attack today is always justified by a previous transgression or just cause for revenge. The consistent focus on how to act toward members of one’s family, clan, and tribe; the details of just punishments and rewards; and the many acknowledgments of and invocations for the protection the Eternal Blue Sky—the Mongol deity—all are meant to teach future generations crucial cultural values. It is significant that people of the steppe, having accomplished an unprecedented cultural, military, and material transformation, chose to record these lessons in a literary form. De Rachewiltz draws a similar conclusion, calling The Secret History … an heroic epic, aimed at recording not only the deeds and pronouncements of Chinggis Qan [Genghis Khan], but also those of his faithful companions in a language and style that reflect the attitudes and values of contemporary Mongols. It is at the same time a glorification of the conqueror’s clan for the sake of posterity, especially of his immediate successors, and the mere fact that it was put down in writing so soon after his death (in the form which it still largely retains) indicates, in my view, that it was also meant to serve as a guide and instruction, not just as a plain record or entertainment. [de Rachewiltz 2004, p.lxix] In Mongolia today, the life and accomplishments of Genghis Khan are well known and freely celebrated in books, music, drama, and the plastic arts. Increasingly this is also true throughout the world. In each case, The Secret History of the Mongols is the primary source. In her catalog of translations of the The Secret History of the Mongols, Sarantsatsral (2006) lists nearly every major, and many minor, European and Asian language including English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Japanese, Modern Mongolian, and Modern Chinese. More than forty translations have appeared since 1990. As the twenty-first century begins, nearly everyone on the planet can read the book that was once the private property of the descendants of Genghis Khan. The version we read today is a record, albeit a selective Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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one, of actual people and events. It is epic in scope, joining the story of a man, his contemporaries, and the diverse nomadic nations they united. It is weak in its depiction of sedentary Chinese, Tangut, and Islamic cultures the Mongols fought because it is not about them. The book’s intended audience was the members of those families who carried on the cultural transformation that Genghis Khan began. With this in mind, we can better understand why it is a book worth reading in any language. Its uniqueness enables us to hear the voice of a culture barely understood by the people that it conquered, a culture that contemporary historians can no longer ignore. Bibliography Cleaves, Francis Woodman, The Secret History of the Mongols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. De Rachewiltz, Igor. The Secret History of the Mongols, A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, Brill’s Inner Asian Library, Volume 7/1-2, Leiden: Brill, 2004. Kahn, Paul. The Secret History of the Mongols, The Origin of Chingis Khan (expanded edition) Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1998. Ratchnevsky, Paul, Genghis Khan, his life and legacy, translated by Thomas Nivison Haining, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Sarantsatsral, Ts. “The Secret History of the Mongols” and its translations into foreign languages, Ulan Bator: Bembi San Publishing House, 2006.

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Driving A Truck Through A Sway Among A Swarm

Some of us share a social agreement that poetry is the best way to communicate essential things. Poetry is such a narrow, low impact form of communication. How can we make a few words on a page express our experience of living beyond thought in someone else’s mind? How can we look out of our self and into the world that we are part of and separated from? It’s the old story told again Lost in the brush of the sentence Looking through the bars At the invincible caged world –

I Was Blown Back, by Norman Fischer 150 pages. Singing Horse Press, 2005. paper. $15 US. 0-935162-32-1.

Norman Fischer has written a marvelous book of poems about the experience of thinking the unthinkable. The book consists of two parts: ‘I Was Blown Back’, a group of untitled short individual verse, and ‘Ask A Difficult Question’, a long numbered series of poems. The latter has the subtitle ‘Variations on Rumi’ each section beginning with a quotation from that 13th century Persian poet. Norman Fischer is a religious man. He is not an English professor or creative writing teacher, the two most common professions American poets gravitate towards. He is a priest in the American lineage of Soto Zen Buddhism and he has been actively practicing that profession for thirty years. To demystify, since Zen and Buddhism are loaded words, he is a meditation teacher and pastoral counselor. He sits, he leads groups of people in the practice of ‘just sitting’, he lectures and counsels people who are trying to attain religious insight. It is a profession that involves a profound combination of isolation and confrontation. The reader can sometimes find glimpses of the priest in the poems, a figure whose costume is a sign and a metaphor, playing with the robes and knots, beads and burning incense sticks. I put on these robes long ago not for the purpose Of covering but to uncover All these knots not for the purpose of Untangling, which would be the end

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But so as to set aflame, cool, So that all float down while I watch And leap and journey

These poems seem to be a result of that daily fluctuation, this practice of focusing the mind without grasping at meaning. As a result, while it is not difficult to tell what the poems are about, it is difficult to say what Fischer’s poems mean. The poems are hard to hold on to. The words go by, one line after another, occasionally snapping together into couplets or phrases that fall apart again, leaving the reader unsure whether the meaning is happening on the page or in the reader’s experience of similar words, similar metaphors, similar landscapes. The music is soothing and easy to listen to. Fischer often demonstrates a mastery of technique, building metaphors from jarring opposites and surprising juxtapositions, joining lines of words with assonance and alliteration, weaving syncopated rhythms. How hard I work To open locks for which there seem to be no keys Stranded here as usual beside the pump While the social body blunders on in the forced march of its deceptions Toward a lurching just maybe possible dream That seems to saturate my soul like starch in a shirt But always comes to nothing when I can’t wake up

Is ‘the pump’ a beating heart or did I make that up? I had never thought of religious experience acting on the soul in the way I have seen starch cause the limp and wrinkled fabric of a white shirt to temporarily appear stiff and smooth, the way we would like a formal shirt to look when we appear at a formal occasion. This metaphor blossoms among all the variations of ‘s’ sounds, when the metaphorical mind joins ‘saturate my soul’ and ‘starch in a shirt’ with the grasping fingers of analogy. But in these poems nothing is quite like anything else for more than a line or two. The most predictable and the most astonishing things happen simultaneously. The poem concludes with an invocation of mechanical regularity and cartoon surprise. Still, planes take off into sky The way you imagine something that might occur tomorrow That won’t quit once you start in on it Nor blow up properly when the fuse is lit Giving life that razor’s edge quality

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After all, the predictable happens, and so does the unpredictable. Most poets write to make meaning, to record some relationship between feeling and thought in the form of words. Fischer writes poetry as a way to search for relationship between language – memory, passing thoughts, sensory experience, globs of words that coagulate into associations – and its opposite – a space so empty of conceptions, pre- or post-, that it might be the place where the world actually exists. Poetry’s a way not a topos In which something appears It’s a sway among a swarm To be hurled from side to side Against the language walls That tunnel subversive Through what is As far as it is known Occasioning a gap in mind Through which you could theoretically drive a truck

If that passage is a statement of intention, it goes some way to explain why Fischer is attracted to formal writing projects that literally fill ‘a gap’. His recent book Success (Singing Horse Press, 2000) was selected from 28 lines written each day for one year, filling the pages of a daybook. The long poem sequence that makes up ‘Ask A Difficult Question’ consists of lines written to fill the blank space in a book preprinted with quotations of a saint from an Islamic tradition quite distant in time and culture from contemporary America. The setting of the poem, the context as it were, is the poet’s return to his hometown in northeastern Pennsylvania, one of the places where Polish Jews settled after the great migration at the turn of the last century, on the occasion of the death at the age of 52 of a close family member. The poem is a meditation on a particular kind of death, the death that comes, by social convention, too soon. But by describing the poem in this way, I am making it into something that it is not, a narrative experience with characters, a setting, even a plot. The poem doesn’t work like that. It passes in and out of focus, moving from assertion to observation to internal meditation at the turn of a line. Every once in a while, such as in this last part of section 5, I feel I can see what’s going on. And they believed in the words that reminded them Said, Pay attention to what has been told To what has passionately been repeated and sung

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What has been sounded out on trumpets Pay attention to that When you come in and when you go out By your arm and on your head Do not imagine or construct anything Because you cannot make anything that is not tainted By wild desire, it is not new Running along another road But remember the story of what’s been repeated In the comfort of authority Be bound in that for the goodness it brings Being a fine person is that Held in the flaming words Of how you are, be that In the town create people to depend on to use For the going Of the entanglement of where you are to go A white piece of cloth Only knotted that way Call it a name but do not say the name Know it but do not think of it as a name

I can see a man, perhaps myself, standing in a synagogue surrounded by family members, repeating prayers that exalt God, prayers that existed before they were memorized and, once memorized, now exist deep in the complex where thought and feeling arise, “And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be an ornament for your head between your eyes.” (Deuteronomy, 6:4-8) I see a man standing ‘In the comfort of authority’, describing for my benefit an interior dialog of what it feels like to pray the way Jews pray. But as soon as I fabricate this picture, I look back at the poem and wonder where it came from. Not simply from the words on the page. Another person might see a different picture, or might see nothing. That ‘white piece of cloth’, is it a prayer shawl or an image in a Buddhist sutra that is not already stored in my brain? Why do we ask, like Adam, for everything’s name? It is a noble gesture to speak about the unspeakable.

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Recent Books by James Koller

I. Poets write poems. They write poems for their own reasons: to communicate, to record, to remember, to perform in language an event that occurs inside a human brain. People who read poetry often carry poems with them, in their brain, perhaps some lines imperfectly caught in the ganglia that merges with a time or place in their life. Like the lives of saints or the legends of heroes, tales of poets are taught to us in a narrative that is means to connect a state of grace from somewhere inside a culture, a state we need to give meaning to our daily lives. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure dome decree * Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed * So much depends upon a red wheel barrow * My real trouble is People keep mistaking me for a human being * America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel * Qui beaulté ot trop plus qu’humaine, Mails ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Statement, observation, captured in a few chosen words of someone’s language, sometimes a new way to say what is already known, sometimes a memory of a language we never knew. But someone tried to teach us, someone impressed by a song that carried that language into a present. The poems are collected into books which eventually are published, usually in small editions by small publishers.

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These books appear as a relationship between the poet, the publisher of the poet, and the audience who wants to receive the information.

II, Snows Gone By, New & Uncollected Poems – 1964-2002 James Koller writes poems and publishes them in small books. On two occasions some poems were selected into large books, Poems for the Blue Sky (Black Sparrow, 1976) and Like It Was (Blackberry, 1999). The former is a conventional selected poem from work produced during a period where San Francisco served as gathering place of writers who created one of several alternative poetries. The latter includes an autobiographical pastiche of memoir, poems, and selections from a novel. Both books are good selections of writing by a poet whose life and work is focused on a natural world of familiar things that challenge understanding. When I received Snows Gone By: New & Uncollected Poems – 1964-2002 in the mail, I was happy to see a new collection, some of which I had heard in performance in recent years. Koller regularly travels and performs in Europe, a part of his work that began during his many collaborations with Franco Beltrametti over twenty years ago. Franco was a man of many hyphens: Italian-Swiss, poet-painter, writing in Italian, English and French. That collaboration opened Koller’s work to many places and sounds and brought him to swings through Europe. His time in Europe has brought his work to a new audience, along with translations of his poems into Italian, French, German, Dutch and Swedish. But Snows Gone By is a more surprising book than any other collection of Koller’s writing. As the title states, it contains both new and uncollected poems spanning nearly four decades. In an introductory note, Koller tells us that the “older poems” were all left out of previous books. Left over poems? Rejects? Not some lost manuscript found in a shed tied up in old newspapers. Not Billy Budd found in a drawer when the family decides to sell old furniture. These are rejects, words left out of the dozens of small books. “Collected here, I realize, the poems together probably give a better idea of my total work than any of my other books have – they present a life & work that has been what it’s been, with little need for consistency.” Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, wrote a man from Concord Massachusetts. Do I contradict myself, asked a man from Brooklyn. Do I drop the self-correcting

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Snows Gone By, New & Uncollected Poems – 1964-2002, Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press, 2004

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veil and present myself naked before thee in the things left out? Walk back through time and tell me what you see. Bright moon on new snow. She dreamed of deer. With the dawn she found their hoof prints. 16 March 1999 for Maggie *

WE WERE BORN TO FLOWER And who will taste our honey before we go to seed? 1993 *

ON MY WAY UP THE COAST, VALNETINEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DAY First time, in the dark, I missed the leg of my pants. You heard me, pulled the covers over your head. At dawn, I drank my coffee, watched a sparrow shiver on the windowsill. 14 Feb 1975 * must be another way to the grave this is a damned strange road narrow before & back so narrow I wonder how I came to get this far maybe Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll stay right here set up a camp o build myself a fire in the road right in the middle save all this forget the whole

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damned thing why not have a bite to eat why not before you go 16 Feb 1964

These poems flow backwards in time, the direction of memory. If she dreamed of cell phones in the moonlight, what would she see on the ground in the morning? In Koller’s world, the things we see while awake or asleep are animate. Birds, signs of weather, the season of the trees, the engine of a truck, a shotgun, architecture viewed from the highway. The people we know, the men and women we love and live with are that way, a morning conversation, a voice heard through the phone (but not the phone itself), a face brought back when waking from a dream. The snow is on the ground and in the air, not on the television. I remember the motion of the feathers on that sparrow’s wings from the moment I typed this poem for publication in a mimeograph newsletter. The poem, the image, the thing appear as overlays each time a particular bird returns to a particular architectural detail outside any window. And that road, if you have ever driven it, is very narrow and very dark. It must eventually lead to the real grave, not a metaphor for death. François Villon, the surviving voice of Paris in the late Fifteenth century, was brought into English by Swinburne and other late Victorians more interested in opening than controlling the senses. Koller takes his title from Villon’s Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, a poem on what we might call the medieval idea of transitory life and vanity. But 500 years later, as well as 5,000 years before, life remains transitory. The poem is written by a transitory consciousness interacting with a “real world” The real world is one I’ve carried within me – forty years gone by & the engines still turn & the wheels they drive still turn & drive me & carry me through these summer nights

The surprise is how consistently the poems bring us into the world of memory, evoking dead friends, sights seen on roads across a landscape that has a biological reality but no nation, in a society of people who need and want and love what they see, all quite naked beneath that dress and those jeans. Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

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III. Looking For His Horses Crows Talk To Him

Looking For His Horses, Brunswick, ME: Coyote Books, 2003

Selected poems have a place in our consumption of anyone’s writing. We have faith that someone picked the good ones and saved us some time. Anyone who has read the tangle of prose and poetry improvisations from which William Carlos Williams’ poetry masterpieces Spring and All were ripped, or gently lifted, and then a few brilliant sections further separated for appropriate placement in anthologies and teaching collections, would understand the difficulty of looking at the raw materials. How are we supposed to know what’s good? James Koller has also recently published two small books. We can call them books because they are separate, with covers, and can be held in the hand. But these books are short – about twenty pages each – and without a spine, so we can call them chapbooks, which once meant works of popular literature sold for a few pennies, carried around by peddlers or “chapmen”. They are certainly hard to find in bookstores, lost on the shelves of the poetry section if they ever get there. Both these books provide satisfying examples of Koller’s art: narrative poetry so brief that the story seems to have gone by as quickly as it is remembered. Looking For His Horses is a long poem, 10 pages. A man is looking for something. His horses are missing, we’ll have to assume. The man is riding one through the woods, looking at tracks in the snow. I’ll just keep making a big circle, he thought, study all the openings. Sooner or later there will be a sign. He knew the story would be there, on the ground.

In these woods are characters. A man alone is talking to himself, or talking to his characters: The Gray Wolf, his friend Smith. His characters talk about dreams and history: Garibaldi, Temujin, Ibn Khaldun, François Villon. The narrator is moving while he’s talking to himself or to his characters, trying to gather up what’s been lost.

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The man on the horse asked, Who was it carried the head of his dead friend with him, guessing that the dead might have still more to say?

The conversation suggests ideas, evokes the memory of lives who have moved in and then out of the action of history – what we remember. The man on the horse keeps looking, Paul Kahn | Collected Essays

admiring the sky and “the view from hill to hill, the long view.” Crows Talk To Him is the record of “a twenty day crossing”, a drive across America from east to west and the return to the east. It includes some of the fine “new” poems selected for Snows Gone By, but displays them in a context that moves at a different pace, across the landscape, through the changing weather, rather than back in time. The landscape of America appears rather like it does in the films of Jim Jarmusch, slow and deliberate, the most common things a bit strange. This comparison is not to suggest any form of contemporary influence, only to observe that the foreigner Jarmusch’s sense of the dull exotic is similar to the native Koller’s sense of the familiar alien. There are some characters and dialog: The girl asked why Indians slept in their clothes. Koschei laughed. It’s an old cowboy trick. Mama warned me about cowboys.

There are those moments when the world is something sliding by the windshield, wind and weather. Sometimes it is just a view out the window, perhaps jotted down on a notebook on the empty seat by the driver. Half Donner Lake is open, half iced & covered with snow. The Truckee runs under snow.

The birds of the title follow the rider much like the birds of the sea follow a sailor. What they say is recorded in the way they appear. Two corbies in the median. Betwixt & between. Hawk with all his feathers top of a telephone pole. Back to snow

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on the ground & big wet flakes.

There is moving. There is observing. There is memory. The birds keep crossing the riderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s path. As I read it I wonder, what is the relationship between the inside and the outside? Does the poet see the crows flying out of the rainbow because he is moving on the road? He reads the weather like a rhyme â&#x20AC;&#x201C; if the clouds look like this, the rain will follow. Does the continent have a rhythm? Perhaps the world is talking to him. If some peddler drops these books off in your town, pick them up and enjoy the conversation and the ride.

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