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[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict ]

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In two previous posts (Intro, and Board and Gameplay), I have described my forthcoming attempt to “play” a 130-plus move game, in which I will use quotations, images and anecdotes to express something of the complex weave of thoughts and emotions that govern — in tense and tenuous fashion — the “Israeli-Palestinian problem”.

Here I will commence play, making my initial “moves” in this area of the board:

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Move 1: The Said Symphony

Move content:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 447 — from the section titled “My Right of Return,” consisting of an interview with Ari Shavit from Ha’aretz Magazine, August 18, 2000.

Links claimed:

In his novel of the Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse writes:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

It is in the links between moves, the creative leaps of the analogical mind, that the secret of the game can be found — so the “links claimed” sections of moves can be viewed as meditation points — architecturally, they are the “arches” of potential insight between the “pillars” of existing ideas. Here, no links are claimed, since this is the first move in the game.

Comment:

This is where it begins… with a vision of dissonant voices in counterpoint… ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Introductory moves

Before we get directly into the “meat” of the game, I want to explore its purpose via a few more moves that focus on what we might call the polyphony of ideas — thinking in terms of multiple voices.

Move 2: Hermann Hesse and the Glass Bead Game
Move 3: JS Bach and the Art of Fugue
Move 4: William Blake and Fourfold Vision
Move 5: Bob Dylan and One Too Many Mornings
Move 6: Glenn Gould

Then two moves nudging us in the direction of, then directly into — Israel:

Move 7: Daniel Barenboim
Move 8: Wagner

and specifically to the outskirts of Jerusalem / Al Quds:

Move 9: Golgotha

You might want to consider these nine moves a sort of overture.  Let’s see how that goes…

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Move 2: Move 2: Hermann Hesse and the Glass Bead Game

Move content:

Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel (English title The Glass Bead Game, also published as Magister Ludi) won him the Nobel for Literature.

The centerpiece of the novel is the Game itself. Hesse doesn’t spell out in detail how it is to be played, but his hints are enough to let us know that in play, different ideas from across world culture are combined as if in a virtual music of ideas:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.

It is in an attempt to bring Hesse’s idea of a musical synthesis of ideas into practical application in helping us understand — and perhaps even, god willing, help us to resolve — the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that I am playing this game.

The idea is not to come up with a solution, but a richer sense of the interplay of motives and memories as they build the situation we all now face.

Link claimed:

To Edward Said, in that Hesse immediately precedes Said in his intuition that melodies are not the only kinds of thought that can be juxtaposed in counterpoint and thus integrated in a complex, sometimes tragic, often profound, always human music.

Comment:

The graphic I have used is from the cover of a lovely CD, featuring Arturo Delmoni and Nathaniel Rosen, Music for a Glass Bead Game. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 3: Move 3: JS Bach and the Art of Fugue

Move content:

Bach was my first great love in the arts, and when I applied to study at Christ Church, Oxford, it was essays on Hopkins, El Greco, and Bach — specifically the B Minor Mass — that got me in the door. Years later, when I lived in Warrenton and commuted to a think-tank job in Arlington, VA, I found myself muttering To hold the Mind of Bach over and over to myself like a mantram.

And that, I think, is the key to my games.

I want to think as Bach did, polyphonically — to see the world in terms of counterpoint, to read life musically. And my games, which involve holding related, sometimes harmonious and sometimes conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time, invite and encourage me to do that. They also provide me with a method of notating (scoring, in the musical sense) such multi-thought patterns on the various HipBone boards.

It is Bach, therefore, who is grandfather to Said’s thought, as Hesse is its father — and Bach’s greates expressions of this approach are found in such great summary works as the B Minor Mass and the Art of Fugue.

The taste I offer here is from Contrapunctus IX, which you can hear played by Glenn Gould on the organ here (and download it for 99 cents)…

Links claimed:

To Hesse and the Bead Game, because Bach’s presence, and that of counterpoint whose greatest exponent he was, is fundamental to Hesse’s great Game. Indeed, as he writes in the book:

The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. … One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach — although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

To Edward Said and his call for a symphonic reading of the Israeli-Palestinian situation: because he invokes the mind of Bach himself in the passage quoted in move 1, speaking of the

sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out.

Comment:

It is said that every artist teaches us to see, listen, hear, read, understand in a fresh way, so that the artist’s own work, at first well-nigh incomprehensible, may gradually find its way first into clarity, and then into ease of access, obviousness, popularity, and “classical” status — later stages of the same process will bring it first obscurity and finally oblivion.

We are not yet in a position to hold many thoughts simultaneously in the mind as Bach’s mind held many melodies, but we are opening to the possibility…

Multi-tasking… this will be an early attempt at a game of musical multi-thinking. Please think it through with me… ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 4: William Blake and Fourfold Vision

Move content:

Here’s what William Blake saw:

Here’s what William Blake said, in his Letter to Thomas Butts:

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always.

May God us keep\

From Single vision & Newtons sleep.

Here’s a commentary on Blake’s notion from a fascinating paper by Marcel O’Gorman:

Several Blake critics have attempted to unravel Blake’s use of term “fourfold vision.” Accoring to Jerome McGann, beings of single vision see the world in absolutes. Life is a prison term that ends in a final, discrete annihilation. Men of twofold vision see the world dialectically, according to contraries. Threefold vision enables one to recognize the contraries and see that they are not absolute, but that the boundaries of good and evil shift according to each individual. In Milton, Blake defines threefold vision as a peaceful state, and he associates it with Beulah:

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep.  (M 30:1-3)

Beulah and threefold vision are identified with sleep, restfulness. But fourfold vision involves activity, not sleep. Fourfold vision is generation and destruction, life and death, or even life in death. Evidently, Blake’s understanding of death is unconventional, to say the least. For Blake, death is considered as part of the creative process, a part of life.

Links claimed:

To the Glass Bead Game: because Hesse writes:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Yin and yang are the opposites of the dialectic, but in the yin-yang symbol or tai-chih we see them alternating and interpentrating in the subtle and fluid play between them (Blake’s threefold vision) from which, in Hesse’s words, “holiness is forever being created” — Blake’s fourth.

To the Said Symphony, because precisely that kind of fluid flowing between one perspective and another is what allows empathy to triumph over opposition, and the “other” to become “brother” — the condition in which alone “the peaceable kingdom” / “peace on earth” can prevail…

Comment:

Blake was the mentor of my own poetic mentor, Kathleen Raine, and my own early published poems appeared in a Penguin volume edited by Michael Horovitz and titled Children of Albion in Blake’s honor.

I am happy to remember such friends in writing this game — and amazed to find in the Blake illustration above, which I only ran across today in O’Gorman’s article, yet another visual precursor to the boards on which my games are played. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 5: Bob Dylan and One Too Many Mornings

Move content:

The Bob Dylan song, One too many mornings.

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

An’ a thousand miles behind

Links claimed:

To Fourfold Vision and William Blake: Dylan captures the utterly wrong double-rightness of conflict that features in Blake’s vision — at an intensely personal level. And I’d argue, personally, that Dylan does in music and poetry what Blake was doing in poetry and visual art — at greater depth than his Blakean friend (and companion on parts of the Rolling Thunder tour) Allen Ginsberg.

Comment:

I believe I was at the Colorado Rolling Thunder Revue concert where Dylan sang the version which YouTube presents here from a Japanese bootleg video tape. You can purchase the Hard Rain album — or just the one track — here. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

— four more moves coming up shortly in a follow-up post, and then I’ll take a break.

[ by Charles Cameron — perception, painting, pre-modern, modern, post-modern, heaven, sky, simulation, John Donne, El Greco ]

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It is Sunday.

I find it powerfully interesting that the sky as perceived by painters (our “seers” par excellence) used to be filled with supernatural beings and is currently filled with natural ones — a clear sign that our culture has effectively moved from what one might call a theological vision of the world to a meteorological one (with astronomical trimmings under a clear sky)…

And I see that transition captured very precisely in four words, when John Donne writes:

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe…

The “round earth” is that of modern science, the “imagin’d corners” those of pre-modern maps – and angelology.

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I have to admit, therefore, that I was surprised yesterday evening to come across an El Greco painting of Toledo that featured the blessed Virgin Mary over the city.

I have long been familiar with his better known View of Toledo, which is entirely naturalistic unless you want to consider storm-clouds as portents of a divine presence —

but the second of these images, from the View and Plan of Toledo, came as quite a surprise…

Here is a detail of the Virgin taken from it, to illustrate the point:

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El Greco is famous for painting heaven-and-earth as a continuum – his great masterpiece, the Burial of Count Orgaz, catches the release of the soul from its bodily sheath as directly as Donne’s “to your scattred bodies goe” does to the return of those souls to corporeality at the General Resurrection:

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And yet El Greco, like Donne, sees both – Toledo under storm-clouds, Toledo under the shelter of the blessed Virgin…

But there is more here, in this extraordinary painting. There is a map of the territory…

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If I could say in a nutshell what post-modern is, I would say it is recursive. It recognizes our perceived reality to be a simulation, and is thus always playing with maps and models, as Shakespeare was when he penned the words “All the world’s a stage” to be spoken in a theater whose sign and motto was “Totus mundus agit histrionem” – the whole world enacts a play.

Think of Hofstadter‘s Godel Escher Bach. Of Escher himself, and his image of himself holding his own small world in a glass sphere in his hand…

Think of Korzybski, and his dictum: the map is not the territory.

Think of Gregory Bateson, who wrote:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

Astoundingly, presciently – prophetically? – El Greco is already alluding to this, around 1610, in his View and Plan of Toledo.

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El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz is in the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo.

El Greco’s View and Plan of Toledo is in the Museo de El Greco, Toledo.

Here is the complete text of Donne’s sonnet:

At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood.

El Greco’s View of Toledo is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:

Here we find no blessed Virgin, no angels with their final trumpets — and yet this painting can be viewed as analogous to his Vision of Saint John and the opening of the Fifth Seal — which owes its power to its “otherworldly stormy light” — and thus seen as yet another apocalyptic scene, one which “recalls St. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelations … a landscape of unearthly power and drama: a dialogue between heaven and earth conducted appropriately by the cathedral spire…”

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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There’s a book by Douglas Harding that I very much doubt Samir Khan has read, which may still be relevant to the ad in Inspire #4 that Jarret Brachman pointed to in this piece on Cronus Global — in which he notes the parallel between Inspire‘s ad featuring the choice between paradise and hell, and the choice featured in The Matrix between the blue and red pills…

That image, with its headless figure, put me in mind of another image that greatly interests me — a portrayal of the Imam Mahdi by Mahmud Farshchian — so I rescued it from my files to see if it was a good enough match with the ad for me to suggest a possible second graphic influence to Jarret:

Not surprisingly perhaps — considering that Samir Khan’s work is, putting it crudely, an advertising graphic, whereas Farshchian’s is a work of devotional art, and that furthermore Inspire is a Salafi-jihadist journal while Farshchian is a pious Shi’ite — the match isn’t close enough for me to argue influence…

But it did set me thinking.

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The title of the Harding book to which I referred above is On Having no Head, and although it now carries the subtitle Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious it actually draws on Islamic traditions quite a bit, quoting Rumi:

Behead yourself! … Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!

and Attar:

Cover your breast with nothingness, and draw over your head the robe of non-existence.

and proposing — I’m putting this into my own words, now — the notion that the physical form of a human face is in some sense no more than a mask, veil or hijab over that light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1.9) — a light too profound for the conventional gaze.

And it is this profundity, attributed in Islam to the prophets in general and superlatively to Muhammad, which makes their literal portrayal a matter of some controversy…

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Farshchian’s Imam Mahdi, like Khan’s Islamist Morpheus, is headless, I’m suggesting, because, to speak figuratively, radiance has taken the place of the face.

Which is also why, in this image of what must be for Muslims one of the holiest nights in the history of the world, the Night of the Mi’raj, the Prophet is portrayed without a face — or veiled — in this Persian miniature:

and transfigured by his own fiery “halo” of illumination in this one:

[ by Charles Cameron ]

I am, admittedly, very interested in religion, and Christianity has been the mother-lode for me of the imagery, gestures and profound words that can move heart, soul, mind and imagination into a greater depth.

Advertising, on the other hand… well, let’s just say that the best of it plays on imagination, too, but it is generally more of an intrusion upon – via billboards on landscapes, via commercials in movies, or via irritating jingles and catch phrases that subvert my best attempts at quieting the mind – than an experience of the kind of depth that religion at its best can offer.

But if you are interested in religion, and click online in enough of the right places, advertising that has “religious” content will be targeted to you.

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And so it is that I went online this morning to check out something about al-Awlaki on Islamic Awakening, an American jihadist forum, and found myself invited to consider, instead, wearing some “bold Christian clothing”.

This was while I was researching al-Awlaki, right? the Muslim jihadist preacher?

at:

a site with its own curious graphics…

And looking closer at that logo, isn’t that some sort of triumphalist armored vehicle I see?

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Well, never averse to a pretty girl, and noticing the one in the Bold Christian ad, I thought I’d taker a look at Bold Christian Clothing to find out what sort of fashion sense was popular among the younger Christian set just now, and found I could obtain t-shirts with such comforting images as these…

— this one’s symbolic of our relatively new century, I guess…

or this:

which I am praeternaturally fond of since my online moniker is hipbone, with its veiled reference to the Valley of the Dry Bones in that very same chapter 37 of Ezekiel…

and then there’s this masterfully supremacist rendering of a part of the Lord’s Prayer:

which I must admit isn’t the image of Thy Kingdom Come that springs to mind when I personally hope and pray for heaven on earth.

What exactly is it, you may ask? According to the manufacturer, it’s

The Lord’s Prayer — “Thy Kingdom Come” with an Angel holding the cross, Horses, skulls under the horses, and palm trees (with Shield and Pacific Oracle cross logo added)

It’s also “the softest, smoothest shirt we sell” … “made from combed cotton for your added comfort” and gives “a flattering and stylish fit to virtually any body type”.

I on the other hand think it looks more like a photoshopped variant of the Quadringa statue in London that celebrates Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo:

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In light of all this, I do believe I’ll just wear white – although even that could be misinterpreted, I guess.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

1.

I think of how the Mezquita, once a mosque, must have looked when its whole floor was a single, arched space of prayer:

before Moorish Cordoba was conquered, and the conquerors built a cathedral in the very heart of the place:

like the petals of a flower opening inside the sepals, or a cancer sprouting within the body – for so much depends on your understanding of prayer.

2.

And I think how lovely it still looks, cathedral nestled within mosque under the snow, to this photographer’s eye:

3.

And I think of Seymour Hersh, who has drawn flak for comments in a recent speech about the Bush war in Iraq, and Obama’s continuation of Bush policies – and here’s the part that caught my eye:

“In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What’s this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they’re all worried about some looting? … Don’t they get it? We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody’s gonna give a damn.'”

“That’s the attitude,” he continued. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.”

And I think then of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, that was conquered and became a mosque:

and is now a museum. So these things go, in times of war.

4.

As for the Mezquita, its history is more complex than I have suggested: it was first a pagan temple, then a Christian church, then shared between Muslims and Christians, then made into a mosque, then a church again – and the cathedral as we see it today was built during the Renaissance…

And I think at last how much depends on lofty spaces, and on silence, and on prayer: