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

Meditation part 1 / Move 10

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What to say? There are two sides to the game, darkness and light, and the light encompasses the darkness, and the darkness threatens the light.

I promised a meditation on the state of the game, and it comes in the form of two moves: Move 10: Piano Lesson, by Haim Watzman, addresses the light, and my sense that the game is as much a gift to me as a gift from me to you, while Move 11: Auschwitz and Theodor Adorno raises the darkest question of all, whether art can still function in situations as terrible as those where humans hate to the fullest extent of their powers.
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Move 10: Piano Lesson, by Haim Watzman

Move content:

The content of this move is Haim Watzman‘s story Piano Lesson which comes from his Necessary Stories series, on the South Jerusalem blog he shares with my friend and colleague Gershom Gorenberg. It concerns young Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the rabbinic scholar Moses Mendelssohn, composer – and the man who revived Bach‘s St Matthew Passion after it had lapsed into obscurity for a century or so.

Links claimed:

With Wagner, in complete refutation of the latter’s opinions about Judaism and musicianship – Watzman’s story opens with the words:

I am impressed. You play like a Jew, Felix. What I mean by that is that you have Johann Sebastian Bach in your heart as well as in your fingertips…

contains this more detailed assertion:

This piece you have played so beautifully for me this morning, the Partita No. 5 in G Major, can only be played properly, in our falscherleuchtung age, this time of false enlightenment, by a person of Jewish sensibility. Please do not interrupt me. At your age you are to listen to your elders first. After you listen you may disagree, you may do whatever you want. But first you must listen.

Sebastian Bach was a devout Lutheran, true, but he wrote Jewish music. I do not say this simply to embellish the repute of my ancestral people. The nation Israel needs no trills. I say this after long years of study and performance of Bach’s music, during which I have come to know this remarkable man. Better, I hazard to say, than his own sons did.

What is Jewish about the music? To see that, you have to know music. Which, of course you know. You also have to know what Judaism is. Which, thanks to my niece, you do not. This is scandalous. The grandson of the great Moses Mendelssohn knows nothing of his own people’s special relationship with God.

and closes with:

Remind me to show you the “St. Matthew Passion.” It is such wonderfully Jewish music!

Comment:

I read this story a day or two after completing moves 8 (Wagner) and 9 (Golgotha) and posting the game thus far to Zenpundit, and was astonished and delighted to find that a mind and heart in Jerusalem – friend of a friend – was touching on the same territory: the relationship of music, especially that of Bach, and Judaism.

But not only does Watzman deftly refute Wagner’s position on Judaism and music as presented in move 8, he also specifically discusses the contrapuntal aspect in both music and religious understanding, and the power of dissonance at times to work towards resolution.

This he accomplishes through a discussion of the two “laws” of Judaism, and the complexities of their musical relationship with one another:

I kept working on the piece and the morning prior to the performance I had my epiphany. Here, let me play it for you.

So where is the stress? Yes, here. And here too. At the end of the melodic line. And at the end of the harmonic progression. Which do not coincide.

You see, the underlying harmonics here are the Torah, the Written Law. And the melody playing above it is the Oral Law. The melody would be hollow, meaningless without the underlying harmony, and the underlying harmony would be incomplete and useless without the melody above it.

The simple-minded might think that the two laws should coincide. What good is a God if his message is not clear?

Yet it is the lack of clarity, the occasional dissonance, the unsynchronized phrases that move us forward, that propel us toward the final resolution. And that final tonic itself sends us off into new melodic and harmonic firmaments, from which we again return to our G major chord. One idea begins before the previous idea has been completed. As when you interrupt your Great Aunt Sara.

There is thus an uncanny melodic line here, running from Said through Bach, Gould, Wagner, to Watzman.

Whatever I am doing here – and it feels at times quite lonely, I am not sure how many people will find this game an easy work to follow – in reading Watzman’s tale of Felix Mendelssohn I felt again my kinship with what has been termed the “invisible cloud of witnesses”…

Indeed, my sense of the gracious synchronicity involved in my stumbling across this particular story of Watzman’s at this particular time can only deepen as Watzman concludes his story – and I my move – with this rendition of the Bach Partita No. 5 in G major BWV 829, played by one Glenn Gould…

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Meditation part 2 / Move 11

If the first part of this meditation relates to the game <as a whole, and to the fabric of grace of which, it seems, the universe as a whole is woven, this second part addresses the sense — as bitterly merciless to those who suffer it as grace is merciful to those who receive it — that the fabric of grace is itself picked at and torn by humans, in danger at any point (and perhaps in this moment more than most) of unravelling.

In my personal perspective, I should no more ignore the threat than ignore the grace — for love extends itself in compassion to the one, even as it extends in gratitude to the other.

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Move 11: Auschwitz and Theodor Adorno

Move content:
Theodor Adorno famously said: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

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Think of this move as a sort of metaphysical black hole, an anti-game.

To expand on this idea a little: Adorno was a musical advisor to Thomas Mann while Mann was writing his novel Doctor Faustus — a copy of which he inscribed to his friend Hermann Hesse with the words “To Hermann Hesse, this glass bead game with black beads, from his friend Thomas Mann, Pacific Palisades, January 15, 1948” – featuring a composer named Adrian Leverkuhn, whose intention in his final work was to retract — cancel, annul — Beethoven‘s Ninth Symphony, and in particular its Ode to Joy with his own oratorio, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus.

 “I find,” he said, “that it is not to be.”
“What, Adrian, is not to be?”
“The good and the noble, what we call the human, although it is good, and noble. What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels, what the ecstatics exultantly announced — that is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”
“I don’t quite understand, dear man. What will you take back?”
“The Ninth Symphony,” he replied.

Herbert Marcuse — another modernist philosopher of the left — is quite clear on the power of this Faustian attempt, which he approves as liberating us from “illusion” and indeed “making us see the things which we do not see or are not allowed to see, speak and hear a language which we do not hear and do not speak and are not allowed to hear and to speak”:

The present situation of art is, in my view, perhaps most clearly expressed in Thomas Mann’s demand that one must revoke the Ninth Symphony. One must revoke the Ninth Symphony not only because it is wrong and false (we cannot and should not sing an ode to joy, not even as promise), but also because it is there and is true in its own right. It stands in our universe as the justification of that ‘illusion’ which is no longer justifiable.

Links claimed:

To Wagner, because the mythology of blood and race which he promulgated so stirred one Adolf Hitler that the latter carried out the Shoah, in face of which Adorno finds poetry – hence Orpheus and the muses — speechless.

To Golgotha, because Christ is banished and beaten from the city, Jerusalem, whose name is The Abode of Peace — because there is no more despairing cry than his cry at Golgotha: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” — because the Descent of Mercy in human form is then brutally executed as a common criminal – because the very veil that protects the holy of holies in the JerusalemTemple is then torn asunder, as his body is broken – because all this marks the darkest moment in the Christian narrative – and because such desolation, felt by the Marys gathered at the foot of the cross, is nowhere so closely mapped in the history of the arts as by the silence of poetry and the arts before atrocity.

And to Watzman, because despite the Shoah — the Golgotha of my civilization and Hesse’s and Bach’s — and despite Adorno, there is poetry in his voice — an Israeli voice, speaking after Auschwitz, in an Israeli State, in Jerusalem.

Comment:

As I was setting out the ground-rules for this game, my friend Lexington Green made what I’d like to call “the essential objection”. He wrote:

Pals send their teenagers to be suicide bombers. That is beyond dissonant. There is no symphony where one group of musicians is committed to a relentless campaign of murder and terror. Said was using this as one more way of playing make-believe, and claiming moral equivalence. In other words, it was a sophisticated move in an elaborate scheme to help disarm his opponents so his fellow Palestinians could kill them.

There is another point of view, which sees the Israelis enforcing a mutant form of apartheid with attendant horrors on an occupied population – indeed, I have Israeli friends who hold some version of this view — but Lex’s point is crucial:

There is no symphony where one group of musicians is committed to a relentless campaign of murder and terror.

This cuts to the heart of the work, as it cuts to the heart of our world. It is, in essence, the issue of theodicy, and which Lex’s permission I am addressing it in this meditation, within the work itself …

My linking of the cry of Golgotha –“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” – with the cry of Adorno – “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” – is my presentation of the most godforsaken of despair of which we are humanly capable, and I present it within that opposite extremity of human possibility represented by Bach’s motto which I invoked earlier, Soli Deo Gloria.

It is precisely in the context of free will that both possibilities arise, and theodicy becomes an issue. Here, then, is the relationship of darkness to light as described by St John in the Prologue to his gospel:

the light shines in the dark, darkness does not blot it out.

I can say no fairer than that.

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Conclusion:

Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia tells the story of a Manhattan psychiatrist who lived immediately opposite the Twin Towers, and whose otherwise rich interior musical life went blank for months after he witnessed the 9-11 attacks:

My internal life was dominated by a dense and silent pall, as if an entire mode of existence were in an airless vacuum. Music, even the usual internal listening of especially beloved works, had been muted…

“Music”, the psychiatrist said, “finally returned as a part of life for and in me” after an absence of several months. The first music to return was Bach‘s Goldberg Variations.

Again, I must admit it was by no skill of mine but some grace of god or muse that I stumbled on Sacks’ book today, while searching my cramped and overflowing shelves for something else entirely.

There are, it seems true, periods of silence in the arts, while we absorb horrors of our human doing.

There is also a return from those horrors to the arts — even Marcuse admits this — and as forgiveness, mercy and compassion alike claim, to that great possibility, “a happy issue out of all our afflictions”.

Or so the mystics tell the realists — and time grinds all to dust.

[ next ]

[ by Charles Cameron — quirky world news ]

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Tim Hetherington after being presented with a Quilt of Valor by the Quilts of Valor Foundation

I was saddened to hear the news from Kanani Fong that Tim Hetherington, the gifted documentarian and journalist who made the critically acclaimed film RESTREPO was killed today in Misrata, Libya. Preliminary details are sketchy but early reports had Tim and another reporter suffering shrapnel injuries from an RPG during an attack by Gaddafi forces on Libyan rebels:

Leila Fadel, a Washington Post reporter who was at the hospital, reported that Hetherington was rushed from the battle by ambulance along with rebel fighters. He was taken to a triage tent next to the hospital, she said, and appeared pale and was bleeding heavily. He was pronounced dead some 15 minutes after his arrival, according to her account in The Washington Post.

Story: ‘Restrepo’ presents agonizing war closeup

“Tim was in Libya to continue his ongoing multimedia project to highlight humanitarian issues during time of war and conflict,” Hetherington’s family said in a statement. “He will be forever missed.”

Hetherington was best known as co-director of the documentary film “Restrepo” with Sebastian Junger, author of “The Perfect Storm.” The film tells the story of the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company in the 173rd Airborne Combat Team on its deployment in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. The title refers to the platoon outpost, named after a popular soldier, Juan Restrepo, who was killed early in the fighting.

I did not know Tim personally, though I attended an early screening of RESTREPO where the audience included soldiers who had been at Restrepo and their family members. The documentary was powerful and touched the lives of many people and was a testament to the physical bravery of Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger who stood alongside American soldiers in the firefights of the Korengal Valley. That was Ernie Pyle journalism at it’s best.

Sincere condolences to the friends and family of Tim, who are numerous in this corner of the blogosphere

I thought it might be interesting to look at some views of the Libyan War and then offer some remarks of my own. Of course, readers are encouraged to read each source in full rather than just my excerpt: First up….

CNAS (Andrew Exum & Zachary Hosford) – Forging a Libya Strategy: Policy Recommendations for the Obama Administration

….The most dangerous outcome for the United States is also the most likely, which is a stalemate that prolongs U.S. and allied military intervention in Libya. The relative lack of sophistication and organization among rebel fighting forces means they may be unable to regain the momentum in Libya and defeat Gadhafi’s forces in open combat absent significant direct and indirect support from U.S.and allied militaries – which is not explicitly authorized by UNSCR 1973 and might not be supported by the U.S. Congress.

A stalemate in Libya would effectively result in a de facto partition of the country with a severely underundergoverned and disorganized safe haven in eastern Libya for the rebels that could provide refuge for various militant and criminal groups capable of exporting violence and instability to other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Such a scenario would prolong U.S. and allied military intervention as only a major Western investment in developing the independent governance, economic and security force capacity of eastern Libya would be likely to forestall this outcome. However, such an investment is highly unlikely due to the overarching fiscal constraints facing the United States and NATO countries and competing priorities.

Nice work on a very important policy brief by Exum and Hosford. This one was “tight”, written to the point, properly focused on strategic variables rather than getting bogged down in debatable specialist minutia and delivering clear policy option scenarios. Written in exactly the right mode for a White House/NSC staffer or deputy to SEC to digest and disseminate to their boss or peers. Kudos, gents.

I think Ex and Hosford have correctly diagnosed Libya as a potential albatross for the US from which we stand to gain very little benefit even in the best case scenario. I disagree with their assertion that it would be a tolerable outcome to leave Gaddafi in power. No, that ship has already sailed and we have had enough Lockerbies. To imagine that there will not be ongoing blowback from a rump Gaddafi regime in a fragile neighborhood with which the US will repeatedly have to deal is just not at all realistic.

The Allies badly wanted Gaddafi out. They will have to be pressured now to follow through and the US needs to make it clear that we will neither babysit an enraged, cornered, Gaddafi for the next seven years, tying down an aircraft carrier group and costing the US taxpayer billions, nor we will accept the Brits and French hanging Gaddafi’s triumphant survival on our doorstep as an “American defeat” while skating away diplomatically (which is their Plan B if we refuse to do a Panama type operation for them). They will have to finish the job on the ground themselves and ensure Gaddafi’s death or departure with our support, but not the reverse. Or Paris and London can help build a real rebel army, salted liberally with PMC units and SOF “advisers” to stiffen spines.

CRS Report ( Christopher M. Blanchard) – Libya Unrest and US Policy

….The complexity of these factors and the stress that ongoing fighting places on their interrelationships creates challenges both for Qadhafi supporters and opposition groups. As both parties seek to navigate the political waters of the upheaval and look ahead to potential postconflictscenarios, they face difficult questions about current tactical choices and future means for promoting national reconciliation and governing effectively.

For the opposition, the question of foreign military intervention is complicated by opposition leaders’ desire for external assistance and their appreciation for the strong nationalist, anticolonial sentiment shared by most Libyans. Internally, political differences and competing demands among the opposition’s constituent groups may complicate the maintenance of a united front against Qadhafi counterattacks and complicate efforts to speak with one voice in dealings with the international community. Other regional examples suggest that such internal differences may prove even more challenging for any transitional authority in the aftermath of the conflict…

In a sea of government waste and middling competence, the Congressional Research Service stands out as a gem, giving the taxpayers a tremendous informational “bang for the buck” in reports prepared by experts on a vast array of subjects. While not an advocacy piece, the report is a valuable “backgrounder” on the Libyan War of a kind that you cannot get from the MSM.

Marc Lynch – Why Obama had to act in Libya

….And my conversations with Arab activists and intellectuals, and my monitoring of Arab media and internet traffic, have convinced me that the intervention was both important and desirable.  The administration understood, better than their critics, that Libya had become a litmus test for American credibility and intentions, with an Arab public riveted to al-Jazeera.  From what I can see, many people broadly sympathetic to Arab interests and concerns are out of step with Arab opinion this time.    In the Arab public sphere, this is not another Iraq — though, as I’ve warned repeatedly, it could become one if American troops get involved on the ground and there is an extended, bloody quagmire.  This administration is all too aware of the dangers of mission creep, escalation, and the ticking clock on Arab and international support which so many of us have warned against.  They don’t want another Iraq, as Obama made clear…. even if it is not obvious that they can avoid one. 

Lynch is an Arabist, and while the internet traffic aspect is skewing the demographic, al-Jazeera coverage is a dominant information effect in Arab public with limited literacy. It is sort of the Walter Cronkite effect from the 60’s in play again, if the primary trusted source is broadcasting an interpretation, it takes on the air of truth for a majority of viewers. That said, it matters very little whether al-Jazeera is giving kudos to the US if the average rebel can’t fire an RPG, quickly unjam and reload his AK-47 under fire, get water or food in the field or dig simple trench and sandbag defenses. Guys milling about nervously out in the open road, brandishing weapons and arguing amongst themselves will get their clocks cleaned by any opponent with even marginal military training and leadership. Gaddafi’s military forces are fourth rate – this is not Saddam’s army of 2003, much less of 1991 – but they can handle untrained and leaderless groups easily enough.

Which brings us to…..

Thomas P.M. Barnett –Arming the Libyan rebels

…There’s also al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), but that group has frankly struggled to be taken seriously as a force, as it’s mostly a relabeling of an existing group that was going nowhere (bigger the territory in the title, more likely, in my mind, that it’s not exactly succeeding anywhere). Up to now, no one has portrayed that group as Libyan-centric.  Yes, they will show up, but that’s standard.  The reality, as noted in the piece, is that you have to train on what you provide, so we’ll have people on the ground (besides the CIA already there).  If things go really sour, then we burn that bridge when we come to it.  But this is not a logical showstopper.  A Libyan long divided in two and suffering civil conflict will do the same – or far better – for AQIM than a concerted arms push to dethrone the guy.  So, again, factor them in as the cost of doing any sort of business here, but do not elevate them into the decision-tilting bogeyman, because they’re not, and speculating in the press doesn’t make them so.

Going the Reagan Doctrine route was my original preference on Libya and I am still in favor of sponsoring an insurgency war against Gaddafi, with a couple of caveats.

First, SECDEF Robert Gates’ strong aversion to doing this gives me some pause, given his background as a former head of the IC and his access as SECDEF to our best current intelligence (which, admittedly, may not be that much). His judgment should be given considerable weight. Secondly, where are the Arabs? A hundred or so experienced NCO’s and junior officers from Egypt and KSA would be of immense help in establishing unit discipline and basic training for the rebels. The Saudis very well might be contributing substantial amounts of cash but that’s no longer good enough. The Arab League needs to show it’s alleged support for helping the rebels and removing Gaddafi with boots and not just empty words.

Reflexively, American policy makers face a great temptation to “own” the crisis and micromanage the Libyan War against some impossibly unrealistic standard of success. Let’s resist it. We should help drive nails in Gaddafi’s coffin but we don’t need to be the main hammer. Sometimes less is more and the Libyan rebels getting rid of their tyrant badly is better than us doing it for them well.

They Just Don’t Make Caliphates Like They Used To….

SWJ Blog featured a lengthy (30 page) essay by Dr. Tony Corn on….well….many things. Corn begins with caliphates and then sort of takes off much like a blown up balloon abruptly released by a child prior to tying a knot in the end.

The Clash of the Caliphates: Understanding the Real War of Ideas by Dr. Tony Corn

….For one thing, within the global umma, there appears to be as many conceptions of the ideal Caliphate as there are Muslims. This grass-roots longing for a symbol of unity should be heard with the proverbial Freudian -third ear,?? and seen for what it really is, i.e., a symptom rather than a disease. For another, by agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), America and Europe have, in essence, already granted the OIC the status of a Quasi-Caliphate.

More important still, it is time for Western policy-makers to realize that the ideological rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has been going on since 1979 constitutes nothing less than a Clash of the Caliphates. Through a soft power strategy blurring the distinction between -public diplomacy?? and -political warfare,?? -humanitarian aid?? and -religious propaganda,?? the two states have been the main drivers of the re-Islamization process throughout the Muslim world. The one-upmanship dynamic generated by the rivalry between these two fundamentalist regimes is the main reason why, from the Balkans to Pakistan, the re-Islamization of the global umma has taken a radical, rather than moderate, dimension.

Ok, “caliphates” as a metaphor/analogy for geopolitical rivalry of Muslim states works but it is not really what Islamists or normal Muslims would mean by the term. It is a very odd usage. I’m not overly bothered by that because I tend to like analogies but Corn’s device here is apt to make the heads of area studies and Islamic history scholars explode. The whole essay is in this meandering, idiosyncratic, vein.

Now that is not to suggest that you should not read the piece. Dr. Corn held my attention all the way through and he has a number of excellent observations on many, loosely related, subjects. For example, after discussing the pernicious effects of Saudi donations and Edward Said’s agitprop theory of “Orientalism” on the intellectual objectivity of academia, Corn writes:

…The combined effect of the House of Saud and the House of Said is the first reason why the Ivory Tower has done such a poor job identifying the nature of Muslim Exceptionalism. A more indirect, yet more insidious, reason is that, unlike in the early days of the Cold War, American academics across the board today are trained in social sciences rather than educated in the humanities. For social scientists, Explanation (erklaren) and -theory-building?? take precedence over Understanding (verstehen) and -policy-making. The victory of the -numerates over the -literates in the 1970s has produced a generation of scholars who show a certain virtuosity when it comes to -research design, but display an amazing lack, not just of historical literacy, but of -historical empathy as well. Not to make too fine a point: the Long War is being waged by a generation of policy-makers who, however articulate, never learned anything about history in their college years

Corn is spot on here. Not only is it spot on, it is likely to get much worse. After a brief qualitative “bump” from Iraq-Afghan war  language trained vets, diplos, analysts and spooks peters out, we will have the Gen Y kids with K-12 educations scrubbed free of history, foreign languages and science graduating from college with communication and marketing degrees and entering government service. Hang on to your hat when that happens.

What Corn really requires to vault his essays to the next level are the services of an experienced editor because less would be more. The man is erudite and insightful. He writes forcefully and raises a number of points that are important and with which I agree. Corn, commendably, also makes more of an effort to connect the dots than most. But maybe, if you have an essay that references David Kilcullen, Trotsky, neo-Ottomanism, lawfare, Sam Huntington, neo-COIN, Nasser, Vatican II, the Comintern, the Hapsburgs, Ataturk, public diplomacy, al- Qaradawi, social media, Fascism, Marc Lynch, Youtube, network theory, the UN, hybrid wars and the Protestant Reformation, it might be time to up the Ritalin dosage a notch. Jesus, there’s either a book proposal or four different articles in that kitchen sink of an op-ed!

Read it and take what is useful.