Popular Superstitions and Old Habits

Giotto Di Bondone, Allegory of Obedience, ca. 1330

"...hitherto nothing has been practiced and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience..."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Giotto Di Bondone was born in Del Colle, a village in the commune of Vespignano near Florence in 1266 (Woltmann and Woermann, ed. by Sydney Colvin, History of Ancient, Early Christian and Medieval Painting, 1880). Giotto was an architect and painter in cities across Italy. Only three years before his death in 1337, Giotto was appointed by the comune of Florence to the position of chief architect of the Florence Cathedral, a testament to the high esteem in which he was held by both his cohorts and the civic leaders of his time. Dante and Petrach both laud him for his mastery in the arts and one scholar has written that "the opinion of his contemporaries entertained of Giotto as the greatest genius in the arts which Italy in that age possessed..." and, "It was not only the artist Giotto, but the whole man, that impressed the minds of his contemporaries."

The beginning of Giotto's artistic vocation was devoted to the Franciscan order at Assisi. Later in his career Giotto would return to Assisi and it is there at the Lower Church, above the tomb of St. Francis, that he painted the Allegory of Obedience shown above. The central, winged-female figue is Obedience and she is flanked by a Janus-faced Wisdom and Humility holding a torch to the viewer's right. Obedience places a yoke upon a Franciscan monk while angels and other characters look on. Above the scene St. Francis himself is pulled up to heaven by two arms while two angels appear to recite the laws of the Order of St. Francis.

All well and good, except according to Alfred Woltmann, Giotto didn't really like the monkish way of life:

"he who had to put so much of his art at the service of the Franciscans had, in doing so, become disgusted with the monkish temper, he protests with rare independence against the mischievous wolves who, in their false clothing, seem the mildest of lambs, and against disguised lust of power and hypocrisy. Poverty unsought, he says, is bad enough, but voluntary poverty, at least, did not lead to wisdom, morality, virtue, or knowledge, and it was a shame to call that virtue which consisted in despising what was good."*

* For the full text on which Woltmann bases his claim see, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. II, Boston, 1887, pp. 212-214, "Giotto Di Bondone, Canzone. Of the Doctine of Voluntary Poverty."

The Materialism of National Pride: the Case of the Coin and the Body

Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands' right-wing, Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom)

This is sort of longish, but here it goes...

On the BBC World Service broadcast this morning a correspondent interviewed some folks from Holland on their views of the Euro-zone crisis and what they thought of the option, now promoted by Geert Wilders and the PVV, of returning to the Guilder. The Dutch interviewed liked the idea and supported the PVV for their anti-Euro stance. The PVV is already relatively popular, it's the third-largest party in Holland and wields some not so insignificant influence on the policies of the ruling coalition government because of a "support-pact" made after the last elections. However political insiders and cynics like Matt Steinglass of the Financial Times have stressed that Wilders' new platform on the Euro is nothing more than political opportunism for a party that until the crisis began, focused singularly on the immigration "crisis" and the menacing threat of creeping Sharia law and so-called Islamo-fascism in Europe (www.FT.com, 11/13/2011). Yet Gilders himself made a tantalizing and perhaps compelling connection between his party's two favorite bogey-men when interviewed by the BBC. I paraphrase: "We have hundreds of thousands of immigrants in our country who are given housing and money and we get nothing out of it and on top of that we have a foreign coin."

Christopher Howgego writes in Ancient History from Coins (London, 1995), "it is wrong to deny that there is a connection between coinage and autonomy." Coins make political statements about national identity and prestige. "they assert the identity of the polis, kingdom or state which produced them... It might be a matter of pride for the badge of the city to be current, and the act of coining itself might be an affirmation of the status or autonomy of a polis..." I write this during Chanukkah and I'm reminded of a passage from I Maccabees that expresses exactly this type of civic pride and assertion of national identity. Antiochus the VII grants Simon the Hasmonean the right to mint Judea's own coins: "και επετρεψα σοι ποιησαι κoμμα ιδιον νoμισμα (your own stamped coin) τη χωρα σου."

Halfway across the globe, the struggle over national pride and identity is playing out around and over a Pakistani woman's body. Never mind that Veena Malik appeared on India's equivalent of Big Brother, which she ably defended in a head-to-head verbal brawl with a cleric on Pakistan's Frontline, she then had the gall to pose "nude" for India's FHM magazine with the initials, 'ISI' prominently emblazoned on her arm.

Malik bears the inscription of the (in)famous Pakistani intelligence agency on the cover of an Indian magazine, the literal sign of Pakistan's secretive arm augmented by the fact that she, a Pakistani for crying out loud, has no clothes on! Oh, she says she was duped by the mag and never intended to pose nude... more to come.

Liriodendron tulipifera

Fall in New York: Cones of the American tulip tree

Divine Meadow

On the Bear Valley Trail to Arch Rock,

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

Being and Value

Zeus impregnates Danae with golden rain, who begat Perseus

Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907

"Thanks to the mysterious potential of my purse... we succeeded in overcoming time."

Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, 1814

So here's another one of Zeus's exploits and we're back once more to the subject of money, if it's not coming out of your ears already! In the myth depicted above, the mysterious power of money is yet again on display. Money, here in the form of gold coins, the measure of value and medium of exchange, becomes the instrument of exchange and insemination between god and mortal. Money overcomes, money creates, and as for the body, money gives pleasure.

There's a poetics to money, but often we're simply unaware of it, we tend to focus on larger social structures, institutions and systems instead of the way in which money or the money function is internalized by people. What is the interior life of money, does it pattern thought, and is there an existential dimension that we must be attuned to? This is why the image above and the myth portrayed are so powerful.

One dissonant feature among the showering gold coins is the black rectangle. Apparently, though I have not looked into this, Klimt used the rectangle in other paintings as well, and it connoted maleness. But there is a tangential quality to the symbol here in Danae. Why is it necessary? Doesn't the torrent of coins suffice as a symbol of male virility?

Answers to come...

But I need your help readers... If you're out there.

Ok, so I'll venture to guess that Klimt wanted his viewers or Danae's viewers as it were, to perceive in the form of a glaring, golden image, the homology of the Phallus and money. The connection between the two was old and new in Klimt's time. Let me explain... Klimt shared Vienna with Freud and Egon Schiele, and if you haven't seen his paintings, please look them up. It is my suspicion that Lacan was impressed by their works (but remember Lacan never pronounced the analogy between Money and the Phallus explicity*). Why the proposed connection between Lacan and Klimt and maybe the German Expressionists in general? While it is true that Klimt and Schiele did not depict headless women like the later Surrealists... Klimt and his crew were Viennese... and so was Freud, so why not? Incidentally, there's an article about the Lauder's, and the Neue Gallerie, and their paintings, in the Times today. 'Nough.

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*more on that issue soon!

The End of Storytelling

"Modern man no longer works on what cannot be abbreviated."

-Walter Benjamin

I should be working on my dissertation, Reading Money and Exchange in Talmudic Literature, but instead I'm "busy" writing on this blog that no one reads. I just read that Qaddafi's Little Green Book was just that, short and it seemed to one journalist that it would have taken no time at all to produce it. But Qaddafi was in power for over 40 years! Good riddance.

By contrast, I was told by a professor of renown, as a college student, all green but raring to go cut my teeth on some ancient Jewish text, to go slowly as it took Jacob seven years to gain the hand of Rachel in marriage. The reader should know that the Torah is an object of erotic veneration so to speak, and is bride to those who study Her. This same professor, the leading scholar outside of Israel on the Kabbalah and especially the Zohar, related that he had spent his years as a student simply transcribing manuscripts of Hebrew and Aramaic mystical tracts before he was ready for any writing on the level of analysis of these texts.

For the professor, the story could not be abbreviated and would lose its power if not conveyed by one who is "at home in distant places as well as distant times." But information can be distilled and must be verified to be palatable.

Walter Benjamin loved Buber's Hasidic tales; all of the dynasties of the Chasidishe Velt trace their lineage to the Ba'al Shem Tov, whose entire biography is woven together from the stories of his disciples - the one shred of "verifiable" evidence of his existence comes from a Polish tax log. And today, well, the descendants and adherents of a movement whose progenitor was a pipe-smoking, ragamuffin storyteller (who also had a knack for telling people which towns in Poland they should avoid), are the fastest growing segment of the Jewish population. Yes, this is only one side of the coin: the chapter title "Sermons, Stories and Songs: the Marketing of Hasidism," from Dynner's Men of Silk, is sure to whet your appetite for another take on the "story."

So in 1936 Benjamin announced that "the art of storytelling is coming to an end..." - but remember: that's the same year Faulkner published Absalom! Absalom!

In Memoriam: The Marriage of Scholasticism and Ethics

Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, zts"l

(March 12, 1943 - November 8, 2011)

Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshivas Mir Yerushalayim

אשרי מי שעמלו בתורה ועושה נחת רוח ליוצרו

New discovery: From the great bowl of treats that is the blogosphere, I have seen the Rosh Yeshiva's old yearbook entry from Chicago. This is touching; his quote is the bold line from the poem, Lady Clara Vere de Vere by Tennyson:

From you blue heavens above us bent,

the gardener Adam and his wife,

smile at the claims of long descent.

Howe'er it be it seems to me,

'tis only noble to be good.

kind hearts are more than coronets,

and simple faith than Norman blood.