In Memoriam, Always Already

The view from my apartment complex.

Esta bala es antigua. 

En 1897 la disparó contra el presidente del Uruguay un muchacho de Montevideo, Arredondo, que había pasado largo tiempo sin ver a nadie, para que lo supieran sin cómplice. Treinta años antes, el mismo proyectil mató a Lincoln, por obra criminal o mágica de un actor, a quien las palabras de Shakespeare habían convertido en Marco Bruto, asesino de César. Al promediar el siglo XVII la venganza la usó para dar muerte a Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia, en mitad de la pública hecatombe de una batalla. 

Antes, la bala fue otras cosas, porque la transmigración pitagórica no sólo es propia de los hombres. Fue el cordón de seda que en el Oriente reciben los visires, fue la fusilería y las bayonetas que destrozaron a los defensores del Álamo, fue la cuchilla triangular que segó el cuello de una reina, fue los oscuros clavos que atravesaron la carne del Redentor y el leño de la Cruz, fue el veneno que el jefe cartaginés guardaba en una sortija de hierro, fue la serena copa que en un atardecer bebió Sócrates. 

En el alba del tiempo fue la piedra que Caín lanzó contra Abel y será muchas cosas que hoy ni siquiera imaginamos y que podrán concluir con los hombres y con su prodigioso y frágil destino.

***

This bullet is ancient. 

In 1897, a boy from Montevideo fired it at the president of Uruguay after spending a long time in solitude so he would be known to have acted alone. Thirty years previous, the same projectile killed Lincoln, in the criminal or magical act of a thespian made Marcus Brutus, assassin of Caesar, by Shakespeare himself. At the turn of the seventeenth century, vengeance used it to deal death to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the midsts of the public catastrophe of battle. 

Before that, the bullet was other things, because Pythagorean transubstantiation is not only the domain of men. It was the silk cord that Oriental viziers met; it was the artillery and the bayonets that destroyed the Alamo's last defenders; it was the triangular knife that slit the queen's throat; it was the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer and the wood of the Cross; it was the poison that the Carthagean general kept in an iron ring; it was the placid cup from which Socrates drank one late afternoon.

At the dawn of time it was the rock that Cain threw at Abel. It will be many more things that we cannot yet fathom but that will be able to put an end to men and their prodigious, fragile destiny. 

— Jorge Luis Borges. In Memoriam, J.F.K. English translation mine. 

Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity: Ahmed the Gargoyle’s Mudéjar Challenge to Contemporary Islamophobia

This is what I meant to write last year. I originally composed it in response to a call for papers that was framed in such a way that would let me explore some of the ideas that I was trying to get to then. This was the result:

***

I spent the morning of September 11, 2001 in a darkened auditorium in a university art gallery building listening to a long-planned lecture on architectural modernism that Vincent Scully, the preeminent theorist and historian of American architecture, was almost frantically ad-libbing and revising after the sudden and violent destruction of the buildings that would have been the centerpiece of that morning’s discussion but that had only an hour before become the symbols not of the civil, internal, aesthetic destruction of the skyline and the character of the American city but of their literal decimation by sinister, outside forces. In the space of half a morning, the whole history of art, the humanities, humane letters — all the things that make us human — had been thrown into chaos, perhaps even sundered. At the time we couldn’t tell what would become of us.

In the days that followed, little happened to restore that humanity that a few terrorists had attempted to take; we were complicitous, though only by being scared and remaining ignorant. We were told to shop, rather than to read or to learn or to reflect or to craft careful strategy. Sikhs were beaten by ignorant thugs who thought they were Muslim. Muslims were beaten by ignorant thugs who believed they were doing the right thing. Even the rousing, briefly reassuring bipartisan chorus of “God Bless America” sung out from the steps of the Capitol was, in retrospect, only a portent of all the ways in which people of every faith would take God’s name in vain in the ensuing years. The Crusades were evoked. At the kind of cursory glance that we are all guilty of giving the world as we are absorbed in the leaden minutiae our own day-to-day routines, and especially to those of us young enough to remember few meaning-rich details of the world as it used to be, the monsters of modernity have always been made out to be Muslim. Euphonically, alliteratively, though, it is medievalism that can help to draw down that equivalency.

Almost fully a decade after the fateful blue-sky morning that was no darker inside the old art gallery auditorium than it would become outside, a news item from the BBC caught my eye, once again drawing together the history of art with questions about the contemporary practices of Islam. The proverbially curious case of a French gargoyle nicknamed Ahmed is almost too perfect a study in the ways in which grappling with a thorny problem of medieval cultural history can produce, as a side effect, a more sensible way to understand situations that are presented by the fact of modernity. And likewise, sometimes an example from modernity can appear as a diachronic cipher to clarify the tangled mess of a little-understood problem of an earlier period. As much as medieval monsters can solve modernity, modern monsters talk back loudly and speak to the Middle Ages.

Take the Way Home that Leads Back to Sullivan Street, Where all the Bodies Hang on the Air

Prefatory note: I had hoped to write a post about what it means to have grown up as an Arabist entirely in the immediate aftermath of the events of ten years ago. But this post isn't what I meant it to be. It's more concrete and narrative than analytical; I still hope to write the piece I set out to write, but the ideas need more time to develop. It turns out that with respect to making sense of it all, ten years is an arbitrary deadline. (I wrote this before realizing that more than a few commentators and historians  had come to the same non-conclusion.) This is not even really a first draft; it's more a putting to paper of some things that I needed to put to paper to free up some head space to be able to think about the bigger issues.  And really that's what this blog is for: To start to think through my ideas about all aspects of the profession and to put the little details in writing so I can really have room to think through the bigger issues. I wasn't even in New York on the day, but I still physically flinch whenever I see the photographs and I still feel this compulsion to narrate rather than analyze (a compulsion and a deficiency uniquely American, according to some other pundits). All of what follows needed to be said before I can even think about saying something that might be worthy of the gravity of the day.

***

My overwhelming emotion is relief that the anniversary did not fall this year on a day when I teach. At first it seems a petty, self-interested and small-minded response. But upon reflection, it becomes clear just how much of my university career was shaped by the events of that morning. For me, the aftermath has always been within the university. So the only strangeness of my first response is that I should want to mark the day out of classroom, alone, away from any student or colleague, rather than in it.

***

Ten years ago today, I began my third week as a university student.

Having started my days in high school between 7:15 and 7:30, I was convinced that an 8:30 am English class would feel like sleeping in every day; it didn't take me long to realize that even that was pushing it for my night owl self. And so I very, very quickly developed the custom of taking a nap between English 129 and my next class. I sleep with news radio on, and in those days my soporific of choice was WCBS. As I dozed, I couldn't figure out why they were replaying footage from the 1993 bombing of one of the WTC garages. It wasn't a big anniversary. It wasn't even the right time of year. Not long passed before I realized what was actually happening. I leapt out of bed and into the common room of my suite in Durfee Hall. The whole building was quiet except for the TVs playing in every suite, audible because everyone had seemed to have the same reflex: to open their doors. We wandered in and out of each others' suites, silently, almost as if to see if the news on anyone else's TV was different. That is what I remember most of my own experience of the day: our collective, eerie, spontaneous hospitality.

I left Durfee when it was time to go to that next class, a lecture on the history of modern American architecture. The professor was Vincent Scully, considered to be the leading light in his field and the most gifted lecturer I have ever heard speak, a man well above six feet tall whose broad shoulders belied his nearly eighty years. He began class by referring to the syllabus, to the topic of the day's lecture: modernism.  Specifically, he told us, he had planned that day to lecture on how, in ideal aesthetic terms, the Twin Towers had ruined the New York City skyline. (I wouldn't learn until later the legendary extent of his former hatred of those buildings.) Given the morning's events, he told us as he choked up, it was no longer an appropriate approach to the material. Toward the end of the lecture, when he arrived at whatever one could still say about a building that had only just become a symbol of something entirely different than the ruin wrought by glass boxes on the American city, that had only just ceased to exist, he could no longer hold back tears. It was at that moment, witnessing not the destruction of the buildings but a giant of a man and a mind weeping openly in front of three hundred students that I knew that the world had already come to an end.

***

I had been offered an internship at ABC news for the summer of 2002, but turned it down to begin to study Arabic. It was clear that all the Arabic classes would be full to capacity in the fall, and as a sophomore, I would have had low enrollment priority. In terms of the quality of my beginning Arabic instruction, it was a completely fortuitous series of decisions; and so in that respect, the tragic coincidence ensured that I would become a much better Arabist, surely, than I would have been otherwise. But that is not really the subject upon which I wish to reflect upon right now; it is the stuff of sheer coincidence. The rather more pressing question is this: What does it mean to have grown up as a medieval Arabist completely parallel to the Arabism, both pressing and expedient, that most of the rest of the country experienced, viewed, or in some way became aware of during the last decade?

I came into the field as its practitioners were forced to cultivate a pernicious, intentional irrelevance in order to protect the object of our study that in many supplanted the glorious irrelevance that is the entitlement of the medievalist. Many times I have had to tell incredulous interlocutors that no, I don't study medieval Iberia because I wish Jews, Christians and Muslims could all just get along. Almost as frequently I have had to explain to a wholly different kind of interlocutor that no, I don't in any way feel guilty about studying Arabic in this day and age. This, in turn, has required the cultivation of a certain freakishness, an oblivousness to the world as my friends joined up to the departments of State and Defense, and to the euphemistic Company where, in certain corridors, I am told, one can still walk and sing the Whiffenpoofs Song and fully expect someone to harmonize from an adjacent office.

To study medieval Arabic is to push the modern world as far away as possible — perhaps even farther than it would have been before Arabic and Islam emerged into the popular consciousness. Not only have I chosen to study something that is removed from the world in which I live, I have to actively remind myself and everyone else that no, I don't do that. I don't know about terrorists. I can't do more than offer a historical account of regicides and regime changes. Rather than quietly living with my head in the thirteenth century as my predecessors did, I stand and say: Yours is not my world.

Perhaps my despair is different from the despair of the people charged with remembering and with fixing. I can see the failures coming from farther away because they are the same failures of ninth century and of the thirteenth but I am as impotent as they are — even if for different reasons. (Here I refer of course to politicians and not to civil servants or soldiers, whom I have generally found to be well-read, insightful, and equally despairing.) I am no more impotent against this than the people who shouldn't be.

I could say that to pursue the matter of Araby — in the words of another daughter of Eli — is to make a stand for the values of humanism that seem to have eroded over the course of the last decade for a whole host of reasons. But that seems too neat. And the honest truth is that I still don't know. I have no great insight into what it means to be a medieval Arabist after September 11, 2001. Ten years on, and I still can't write this piece. It means nothing. The great world keeps spinning, history continues to pile on top of history, and someone has to read it all.

***

Several years ago I had an exceptional student who happened to be a Naval ROTC cadet; she must be just on the verge of her commissioning now. She chose to write her research paper for my class about medieval military tactics after reading some of the battle hymns of Samuel the Nagid. The presentation of her research happened to fall on a day when she was required to wear her uniform on campus for inspection. I don't know if my other students noticed, but the striking coincidence of the visual and the aural and of the academic and the practical and dangerous was not jarring, strange or even — though I note it now — especially noteworthy.

The Nagid's war poetry is, I think, my favorite of the Arabizing Hebrew poetry from Spain. Perhaps it was inevitable, under the circumstances, that the poetry of war, like the simple fact of war, should feel familiar and appeal intellectually and aesthetically. War and Arabic poetry have occupied my world for precisely the same length of time. Perhaps the towers' collapse is not nearly as far from my mind as I would like.

***

How could it be? It is the matter of Araby that brought me to New York, to an apartment with this view from the living room window:

***

Let me conclude by quoting John Adams, writing in a letter to his wife Abigail in 1780: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

I am grateful, especially today, to the students of war whose sacrifices have afforded me the right to have spent the last decade studying poetry.