Scribblings with Green Chalk

The project isn’t gone, but I had a lot of doubts about posting and halted that part. I’ve thought about the pros and cons of putting up posts and questions vs. just writing the thesis on found and idiosyncratically compiled blog entries. I haven’t resolved it yet.

Meanwhile, in blogland, a post appeared mentioning Sara Baartman. I recommend Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark if you’re interested in the making (and unmaking) of the Hottentot Venus. You will want to sink under ground, reading about the brainlessness of European “science” in the 19th century. The anti-logic of racism never ceases to surprise: while “theorizing” the black female body shape as illness (steatopygia–because it sounds smart if you invent a word), Europeans found it a titillating fashion inspiration. The bustle, a scaffolding-like device inserted underneath ladies’ dresses, compensated for the flatness of the–supposedly ideal–European derriere. The pornographic interest showed by visitors to the exhibitions where Bartman was displayed (much like an inanimate object) is quite terrifying even to read about. Interestingly, the perception of how acceptable this kind of interest was did differ: a sketch reprinted in Hobson’s book shows that some of the contemporaries considered it outright morbid that “gentlemen” and “ladies” alike would scrutinize the details of someone’s anatomy under the pretence of scientific interest.

Patricia Hill Collins’ thoughts on the easiness of objectifying others (Others) shed some light on what happened then and what keeps happening to Baartman. Even today, despite of best endeavors, many academics researching Baartman end up presenting her as a non-person, Collins observes. Pretty slideshows begging for the use of pictures and pointers can turn an informed discussion of the body into a freak show in which again we watch it as a curious object, as if it didn’t belong to a human being. Read more in the sections of Black Feminist Thought devoted to Baartman and pornography.

More arguments for my developing conflict with the idea of the Muse.

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

(The title is absolutely borrowed. I am intrigued by how powerfully this combination of beauty and emotion with dismemberment works. If you’re curious about the source, read Linda Gregg’s poem, completely unrelated to this discussion. If not, pass on to my rambling below.)

The conceptual marriage of beauty and suffering comes across as a Gordian knot. I say “comes across,” not “is,” because I don’t believe this link is necessary for our thinking about either concept. Yet together they come to produce a new quality, a kind of beauty martyrdom.

Many concepts are inverted along the path to salvation through beauty. (Something called “beauty” being conceived of as, paradoxically, both essential and produced, its production and attainment of a “natural-looking” ideal desired without questioning.) Most importantly, pain becomes anaesthetized in the beauty discourse. It becomes something purely imagined and exaggerated. In beauty martyrdom, pain doesn’t exist. It’s swallowed before the mind could let it come into being.

The mind. Smoothly inserted into the body, which is — what? An object? Property? Easily remodeled clay? Whatever it is, it is clearly divisible from whatever the mind is in this narrative. If beauty is married to suffering, then the mind is forever divorced from the body. In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” (which is a response to [What in the hell...] do things do things look like if we start with the body?, so I recommend reading both) I wrote: The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.

For a far more cogent and comprehensive argument, I suggest looking up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

What I would like to focus on is the question of dismemberment.

It strikes me that this kind of dismemberment seems to have a completely different cognitive impact than the dismemberment of animals as described by Paul Shepard:

Breaking up the world in thought, attending to its diversity and discontinuity, discriminating differences in order to think–all this clearly threatens its continuity and wholeness. Learning the morphology of bodies has been likened to a kind of dissection. The butchering analogy extends as well to the naming of the internal part of the body. Oddly enough, it is the insides of animals that work against the tendency of the world to fragment. (The Others 47)

We need to cut up the world in order to make sense of it and animals are our primary models, argues Shepard. But “butchering” has two different meanings for him depending on the context. When the process of dismemberment is removed from our eyes and made the business of institutions that deliver to us ready products:

Butchery makes new categories by abstracting “meat” from the whole animal, creating a perceptual gap between the food and the thing eaten. (The Others 34)

I wouldn’t want to insist on direct parallels between the animal world with human participation and the human society which sees itself as abstracted from the broader natural context. But I’m tempted to ask if there is any human-to-human equivalent to creative cognitive butchery when the beauty industry so neatly fits the second description?

To what extent can we relate dismemberment to control or creation? Where is the point when these ideas become perverted? When and how did the marriage of beauty to suffering take place?

Or the doctor with soft hands who told me
it’s best to think of pain as a numberbetween one and ten.
– Mary Jo Bang, “Electra Dreams”

It’s two… sometimes three. Not sharp but persistent and annoying. Now that I’ve taken a painkiller it’s just the irritation caused by a tooth where there used to be no tooth. I would like to write about watching raccoons with Zuko, but then my tongue touches the unfamiliar shape of the new tooth and the tooth becomes the story. Maybe I should put up a category called “teeth” and treat this new element of my jaw more seriously. People get pets, beautiful objects. I got a tooth. If it’s not with me next year, I could always celebrate its birthday (hatch-day? eruption day? or, somewhat too proudly, coming out day?).

Somehow I had thought I would be spared. But no, I can feel two new teeth knocking at the gums. Surely they have nothing to do with wisdom.