New angel, new messenger (to me), Kathy Acker ... two pages enough to tell
me this is what should be called LITERARY criticism, the rest is merely
literate criticism (and I admit that it bores me mostly). Thanks to Gary
for introducing the messenger.
Angelus Novus painted by Klee ... hard to hear Benjamin in the dark where I
can't see this painting. Has Bill Gates put it on the web for us yet?
None of it sounds like the accounts of the African model of time, though. A
question asked if it's not like our view of history, and these media of our
tradition, modern, would argue not like it at all. Events for us now, and
not for our Asiatic forebears in the Garden, send ripples of consequences
streaming forward into time, the past pushes us onward into the future. Not
so, it seems for the African, and perhaps many other traditions, even
perhaps our own earlier heritage (I don't know, how could anyone even
imagine to look for such a thing without first an articulation of the
possibility of a coherent alternate view of being-in-time?). In that other
model, it is the successor events to something (for them more saliently
people than thing-like views of events, so: ), the successor generations
that ratify the status of an ancestor, the cumulating reality of Past, no,
of Time, as the ancestors are honoured by the litany of less ancient
generations, as they are made more real, more a part of Time, by the
successor generations.
All those Begats in the Old Testament ... what did they really mean to the
people who wrote them down, who recited them? the ancestor genealogies of
far east Asia? the guru-to-guru traditions of south Asia? To us
euromoderns, all history is the great prelude to US, the evolutionary story
that is our origin myth, that tells what trends we climax. Uncomfortably
egocentric? a frame in which even eurocentrism makes sense as in effect
everything viewed from us-now? INSTEAD: history as honoring the First Days,
history as the record of events that made earlier events more a part of
Time by confirming them, a view backwards in which the focus is at the
start, not the now, in which the genealogy is not about us-now, but about
what Time has made far realer than we shall be for millennia (if we're
lucky; many people don't get to be ancestors because they have no
descendants to look back on them, all Eve's sisters, for instance).
If Yeshua ben Mariam of Nazareth was elaborately contextualized in a
genealogy of the House and lineage of David the King, was that modernist
honor to the former, or traditional honor to the latter? if the point was
to show the prophecies fulfilled, what was the point of the prophecy? in
the modernist view it seems to be that David guarantees the credentials of
Jesus as a Jew of a house in high favor with Yahweh ... but it may have
meant in its day that Yahweh would confirm his favor for David's house by
honoring him with descendants who would make him forever remembered, and
most real in Time.
On the grand cultural-historical scale we recapitulate the simple issue of
autobiography: the meaning of the tale is constructed by the tail. Does the
tail look backwards or forwards at the head? jay.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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