1. How does literature provide us w/an interpretive narrative of a culture? How successful or unsuccessful is it at letting us into another's "web of meaning"? (Rehash of our second class, I know - but I think it's good to reevaluate now that we're nearing the end of quarter).
2. How is the social (or social structure), much like the cultural (structure), "built" through popular media? How might this form of construction be cyclical? How might literature (specifically this Austen reading) be considered an example of ethnography through Geertz's theory?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Geertz: Thick Description, Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture
You only need to read to Part IV of this (first) chapter in Geertz's book.
http://www.stanford.edu/~davidf/qualitative151/geertz.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~davidf/qualitative151/geertz.pdf
Austen: Pride and Prejudice: Chapter Four
"I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak what I think."
"I know you do; and it is THAT which makes the wonder. With YOUR good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough--one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design--to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad--belongs to you alone. And so you like this man's sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his."
"Certainly not--at first. But they are very pleasing women when you converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming neighbour in her."
Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgement too unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them. They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.
Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.
His sisters were anxious for his having an estate of his own; but, though he was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no means unwilling to preside at his table--nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of age two years, when he was tempted by an accidental recommendation to look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it for half-an-hour--was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.
Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy's regard, Bingley had the firmest reliance, and of his judgement the highest opinion. In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley was sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually giving offense.
The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.
Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so--but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as he chose.
Within a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business, and to his residence in a small market town; and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous.
Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was Elizabeth's intimate friend.
That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over a ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.
"YOU began the evening well, Charlotte," said Mrs. Bennet with civil self-command to Miss Lucas. "YOU were Mr. Bingley's first choice."
"Yes; but he seemed to like his second better."
"Oh! you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be sure that DID seem as if he admired her--indeed I rather believe he DID--I heard something about it--but I hardly know what--something about Mr. Robinson."
"Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson; did not I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson's asking him how he liked our Meryton assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty women in the room, and WHICH he thought the prettiest? and his answering immediately to the last question: 'Oh! the eldest Miss Bennet, beyond a doubt; there cannot be two opinions on that point.'"
"Upon my word! Well, that is very decided indeed--that does seem as if--but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know."
"MY overhearings were more to the purpose than YOURS, Eliza," said Charlotte. "Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend, is he?--poor Eliza!--to be only just TOLERABLE."
"I beg you would not put it into Lizzy's head to be vexed by his ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he sat close to her for half-an-hour without once opening his lips."
"Are you quite sure, ma'am?--is not there a little mistake?" said Jane. "I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her."
"Aye--because she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield, and he could not help answering her; but she said he seemed quite angry at being spoke to."
"Miss Bingley told me," said Jane, "that he never speaks much, unless among his intimate acquaintances. With THEM he is remarkably agreeable."
"I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack chaise."
"I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long," said Miss Lucas, "but I wish he had danced with Eliza."
"Another time, Lizzy," said her mother, "I would not dance with HIM, if I were you."
"I believe, ma'am, I may safely promise you NEVER to dance with him."
"His pride," said Miss Lucas, "does not offend ME so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a RIGHT to be proud."
"That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive HIS pride, if he had not mortified MINE."
"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
"If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy," cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, "I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day."
"Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought," said Mrs. Bennet; "and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly."
The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. (Chapters 4 and 5). From http://www.literaturepage.com/read/prideandprejudice.html. Accessed May 13, 2007.
"I know you do; and it is THAT which makes the wonder. With YOUR good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough--one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design--to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad--belongs to you alone. And so you like this man's sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his."
"Certainly not--at first. But they are very pleasing women when you converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming neighbour in her."
Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgement too unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them. They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.
Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.
His sisters were anxious for his having an estate of his own; but, though he was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no means unwilling to preside at his table--nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of age two years, when he was tempted by an accidental recommendation to look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it for half-an-hour--was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.
Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy's regard, Bingley had the firmest reliance, and of his judgement the highest opinion. In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley was sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually giving offense.
The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.
Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so--but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as he chose.
Within a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business, and to his residence in a small market town; and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous.
Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was Elizabeth's intimate friend.
That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over a ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.
"YOU began the evening well, Charlotte," said Mrs. Bennet with civil self-command to Miss Lucas. "YOU were Mr. Bingley's first choice."
"Yes; but he seemed to like his second better."
"Oh! you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be sure that DID seem as if he admired her--indeed I rather believe he DID--I heard something about it--but I hardly know what--something about Mr. Robinson."
"Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson; did not I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson's asking him how he liked our Meryton assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty women in the room, and WHICH he thought the prettiest? and his answering immediately to the last question: 'Oh! the eldest Miss Bennet, beyond a doubt; there cannot be two opinions on that point.'"
"Upon my word! Well, that is very decided indeed--that does seem as if--but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know."
"MY overhearings were more to the purpose than YOURS, Eliza," said Charlotte. "Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend, is he?--poor Eliza!--to be only just TOLERABLE."
"I beg you would not put it into Lizzy's head to be vexed by his ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he sat close to her for half-an-hour without once opening his lips."
"Are you quite sure, ma'am?--is not there a little mistake?" said Jane. "I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her."
"Aye--because she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield, and he could not help answering her; but she said he seemed quite angry at being spoke to."
"Miss Bingley told me," said Jane, "that he never speaks much, unless among his intimate acquaintances. With THEM he is remarkably agreeable."
"I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack chaise."
"I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long," said Miss Lucas, "but I wish he had danced with Eliza."
"Another time, Lizzy," said her mother, "I would not dance with HIM, if I were you."
"I believe, ma'am, I may safely promise you NEVER to dance with him."
"His pride," said Miss Lucas, "does not offend ME so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a RIGHT to be proud."
"That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive HIS pride, if he had not mortified MINE."
"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
"If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy," cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, "I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day."
"Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought," said Mrs. Bennet; "and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly."
The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. (Chapters 4 and 5). From http://www.literaturepage.com/read/prideandprejudice.html. Accessed May 13, 2007.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Major Question: Mapping the Familiar
1. How is culture and society reflected in popular media/literature?
2. How does popular media/literature shape culture and society?
3. What does our consumption of popular literature/media say about our society?
Please consider the different world of familiarity, as well. Possibly start to consider how we define "familiar" and how the WAY in which things are presented may shape our THINKING about how familiar or "normal" they are.
See you on Thursday!
2. How does popular media/literature shape culture and society?
3. What does our consumption of popular literature/media say about our society?
Please consider the different world of familiarity, as well. Possibly start to consider how we define "familiar" and how the WAY in which things are presented may shape our THINKING about how familiar or "normal" they are.
See you on Thursday!
Body Ritual Among the Nacirema
BODY RITUAL AMONG THE NACIREMA Horace Miner
Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pat- tern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are "machismo" in Spanish-influenced cultures, "face" in Japanese culture, and "pollution by females" in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that "attitudes about the body" have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacireman society.
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock. In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Creel the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east....
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which as evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls. While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.
The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.
Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated "holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children, which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man open the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there age no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.
It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women's rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturgy but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and head-dress.
The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple, the concept of culture, ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because "that is where you go to die." Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained admission and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.
The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client's sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men.
Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant's mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people's faith in the medicine men.
There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a "listener." This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the "listener" all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.
In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women's breasts larger if they are small and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.
Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.
Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski when he wrote:
"Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization."
References Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. New York: D. Appleton-Century. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science, and Religion. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. Murdock, George P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan.
Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pat- tern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are "machismo" in Spanish-influenced cultures, "face" in Japanese culture, and "pollution by females" in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that "attitudes about the body" have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacireman society.
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock. In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Creel the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east....
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which as evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls. While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.
The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.
Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated "holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children, which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man open the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there age no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.
It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women's rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturgy but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and head-dress.
The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple, the concept of culture, ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because "that is where you go to die." Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained admission and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.
The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client's sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men.
Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant's mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people's faith in the medicine men.
There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a "listener." This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the "listener" all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.
In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women's breasts larger if they are small and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.
Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.
Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski when he wrote:
"Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization."
References Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. New York: D. Appleton-Century. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science, and Religion. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. Murdock, George P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan.
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Why study (Filipino) popular art? by Edilberto Alegre BusinessWorld, 1 May 2002
Some have asked me why I bother with Pinoy pop art such as our movies, Max Surban, Yoyoy Villame, TV popular program? They are the hoary academicians of University of Philippines (UP) Diliman (Quezon City, Metro Manila), of course. And a few are architects in Cebu (Central Visayas) and other academicians there.
"Because they are our heritage too and probably say more about us than our copies of the seven arts of the West," I'd reply and refuse to go beyond that.
Their question manifests a haughtiness that should not be bothered with. They are not part of my small reading public obviously. Pinoy culture encompass all our products and actions and the distinction high art -- low art, literature in English -- literature in a Philippine language, music composed by a degree holder -- music composed ouido, say, are categories not made by culture analysts. High art, literature in English, or music composed by a UP College of Music graduate are also cultural expressions and are, therefore, legitimate concerns of cultural anthropology too.
They are studied amply by undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and practicing art critics. They are also rewarded generously by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), our official cultural institution. And the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) continues to honor the Filipinos who excel in the seven arts of the West. Those who excel in the indigenous arts and crafts, such as kulintang music and abaca weaving, receive kudos and monetary award of a lesser degree. These manifest the hierarchy in the arts. Copying the west still pays.
The situation can change only by showing through force of logic and adamantine data that there is much to admire in not completely westernized Pinoy pop art. i.e. indigenized Western cultural borrowings. Examples abound: our movies, OPM, romance, novels, TV shows
Millions enjoy our pop art. Millions spend viewing, listening to or reading them. That should be valid enough reason to study Pinoy pop art. In contrast, the Pinoy version of Western art is enjoyed, viewed, listened to, or read by only a very minor trickle of our population. But they, the Pinoy copies of Western art, take a dominant position -- in our textbooks, in our mass media, in the eyes of our own government. Not because they are Pinoy, but because they are copies of the West.
That says a lot about our educational system, our mass media, and our government. What is common to these three is this: they are manned, managed, and operated by the ingliserong Pinoy, the Filipinos who are proficient in the English language. By the elite, in short.
The communication loop of the Pinoy version of the seven arts of the West consists of the artist as producer of art works which are "consumed" by the viewer-listener-reader appreciator. The artist is a product of an educational system which is biased toward the West. The consumer is also shaped by the same system. The middle person critic who explains, explicates, expounds and praises the art work derives his livelihood and reputation from the loop. The loop passes on their preferences to those outside of it via the schools, the media and the relevant government institutions which are also owned or managed or operated by the same socio-economic class, the rich inglisero.
The only way to counter this vicious, oppressive set-up without bloodshed is to present an alternative view that is acceptable, because it is logical and is based on field data, and therefore, incontrovertible. The viciousness derives from its spitefulness to anyone and anything which does not belong to the loop. It also stems from its erroneous reasoning: any art which is not Western or like the West's is inferior.
There are those who belong to the loop who go slumming outside of their vicious circle so they can entertain their kind about having gone "native", and, oh, how so very iba (different) the natives are! Some get their paper thesis or dissertation data from the natives and score pogi points for their promotion and prestige. Of course, after short, sporadic forays into the land of the natives they return to their lovely homes and lovely offices in which they have been ensconced. Such are the habits of class, so very difficult to break because they are so very good.
The said loop is oppressive since it bears down on the rest of our population and keeps the latter subservient by harshness and coercion, though the means to achieve this can be subtle and, therefore, appear to be neither harsh nor coercive. That elite has been in power for centuries and knows all the tricks to stay unchallenged.
To study pop art is thus, for me, an act of self-liberation. Unfortunately, I am an opsi -- math and my road to freedom started only 18 years ago when I boldly turned my back to the ways of the academe, where I was employed, and took the first steps to know who we are and what we are like.
I have never looked back.
The only equipment I had were those which I acquired in the academe -- traditional criticism, neo-criticism; structuralism, a bit of post-structuralism. Quite very Western apparatus.
However, I had an abiding passion for linguistics, the study of the laws which govern languages, since 1958 when I first enrolled in M.A. Comparative Literature in UP. It was my way to our culture. Language was what I had as data and for this there was no need to go to the field.
PINOY TIME AND POP ART
Using language as the starting point, let us examine our concept of time and its relation to art, pop or otherwise. How did we divide time? From the smallest to the biggest: araw or day (which we broke into, beginning from dawn -- madaling araw (dawn); umaga (morning); tanghali (noon); hapon (afternoon); takip-silim (evening); gabi (night); kahapon (yesterday); ngayon (now, today); bukas (tomorrow); buwan (month); taon (year). There are compound expressions for the day before yesterday (noong isang araw) and the day after tomorrow (bukas makalawa). These are time indicators though just like kahapon, ngayon, and bukas.
Time as a quantity are, strictly speaking, indicated by araw, buwan, and taon. A numeral or counter can specify the number of the days, months or years -- e.g. isang araw, dalawang buwan, tatlong taon (one day, two months, three years). Or the length of time can be one-half (kalahati, kalahating buwan); a fortnight or whole -- buo, buong araw, buong umaga, buong gabi -- meaning the whole day, the whole morning, the whole night, respectively.
Time as a quantity which can be measured to the tick of a second or minutes or hours is a Spanish introduction, as the words indicating them immediately shows: segundo, minuto, oras. Relo came from Spanish reloj. We also call the watch orasan, the suffix -an is a Pinoy construction. It was the Americans though who introduce wrist watch for that to the Spaniards is reloj de pulsera. Our term for it is riswats.
Our sense of clock time and the idea that time has to be or can be measured to the briefest second are borrowed.
The millions of Filipinos who do not punch time cards or do not have deadlines to meet simply ignore watches, clock time, and measurements of time. They are more numerous than the Filipinos who are tied to and enslaved by time machines.
Since time is a measurable quantity, in a linear manner an action has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Transferred to fiction, a narrative image of life, then the Western plot must have a defined beginning, middle, and end. Rising action, climax and denouement are logical aspects of time as a quantity or length, which is an expression of quantity, which moves in a linear manner from time1 to time2 time3 and so on.
American fiction is specially action-oriented. Action pushes the story forward. Overt action also depicts the character of the protagonist, of course. Western fiction is plot-oriented because the protagonist is unraveled in time. The unraveling requires conflict which leads to rising action, climax, and denouement or resolution (of the conflict).
This plot as a structure fits aptly for it rose from the Western concept of time. The problem of adaptation rises when we realize that that is valid to them, the Español and the 'merkano, but not to us. For we have a different concept of time. And must therefore have a different approach to or ideas about plot line and narrative structure.
The epitome of the action -- oriented Western narrative is the whodunit or detective story. That genre never quite took roots here.
The Rambo series is interesting but our hero is FPJ who's low-key in comparison. And always has a sidekick. Hindi siya nag-iisa (he is not alone). Hero that FPJ is, he is never alone. There is Dencio Padilla who is forever loyal and a lady love.
There is the terrible aloneness of all the Western tragic heroes -- Oedipus, Macbeth, King Lear, Loman, the American salesman. They experience a fall. Rambo might be on a different trajectory. But they, as all Western heroes, are alone. Time is a linear path which they travel or traverse. A beginning, a middle, an end. Rising action, climax, denouement.
We have no such tragic heroes. No such terrible aloneness. FPJ, Juan Tamad, Dolphy. Unlike the Western heroes, our main protagonist is always connected -- to one other, a friend or a lady love; to several others -- parents, sibling, family. Not tragedy but comedy. Not rising action based on conflict but melodrama. Less height and less acute on angle but rolling hills and flatlands.
Look at their sentence constructions. An explicitly named subject and a predicate, an action word, and, if required, a recipient of the action e.g. "I love you." There's no other way to say this. In our case, "Mahal Kita": verb, pronoun. Where went "I"? Literally, these two words translate as "Love you" (and that is how we say it, "I love you"; the very Pinoy English of "Mahal kita").
The relationship comes first, mahal. Kita is the distinctive "exclusive dual", second person, plural number, nominative case, in many Philippine languages. It means "I-and-you (singular) only" and nobody else.
Still on relationship. "Kumain na ko. Kinain ko yong natira sa mesa." (I've eaten. I ate what was left on the table.) Kumain refers to who ate. Kinain to what was eaten. The infix (-um, -in) depends on whether the speaker is referring to himself as actor or the object of his action. Speaker-self, speaker-object. A verb for us reveals not so much who and action or who object of the action, but the what of the action. Relationship, in short.
Too, we are not conflict -- resolution driven. We shun away from confrontations. Put this relationship -- driven in the same linear time of the West and what would result is not tragedy but a comic, melodramatic story. In that time line (t-1, t2, t3) he'd seek not ako, the nominative case, first person, singular "I" but "I" in it's many relationships: Juan Tamad and the princess. FPJ and Dencio and a lady love or FPJ and a daughter like Judy Ann Santos, Dolphy and his family who resides in a "Home Along Da Riles" (home by the railroad tracks) -- ako in kita, tayo, and kami (tayo includes the person addressed; kami excludes the person addressed).
We borrowed the movie camera and we came out with Pinoy na Pinoy movies -- weak on the plot structure, abloom with deep and meaningful relationships even if there are bakbakan (fight) scenes. Emphasis on the relationships. With and through the movie camera we have been telling our own story.
So with our TV soap operas. So with our OPM. So with our romance novels.
It would be folly to demand Western standard on these very Pinoy pop arts. What we need is a canon of appreciation so we can "upgrade" our popular art to academic, aesthetic criticism. We direly need theories about ourselves so we can better appreciate our own art.
Our concept of time and our "I" -persona, of course, created and continues to create our own form of fiction, movies, TV soap operas. Our own art, which very unfortunately is dismissed as just merely pop by the inglisero critics. But in the end they don't matter. What they are there or not our own art will continue on.
Instead of rising action -- climax -- denouement we should graph our di-pagkakaunawaan misunderstanding and our tampuhan, for which there is no English word. For these are the stuff of our daily lives which are there already embodied and expressed in our popular art. It is in our popular art where we truly are.
From http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/culture_essays.htm, accessed May 6, 2007.
Why study (Filipino) popular art? by Edilberto Alegre BusinessWorld, 1 May 2002
Some have asked me why I bother with Pinoy pop art such as our movies, Max Surban, Yoyoy Villame, TV popular program? They are the hoary academicians of University of Philippines (UP) Diliman (Quezon City, Metro Manila), of course. And a few are architects in Cebu (Central Visayas) and other academicians there.
"Because they are our heritage too and probably say more about us than our copies of the seven arts of the West," I'd reply and refuse to go beyond that.
Their question manifests a haughtiness that should not be bothered with. They are not part of my small reading public obviously. Pinoy culture encompass all our products and actions and the distinction high art -- low art, literature in English -- literature in a Philippine language, music composed by a degree holder -- music composed ouido, say, are categories not made by culture analysts. High art, literature in English, or music composed by a UP College of Music graduate are also cultural expressions and are, therefore, legitimate concerns of cultural anthropology too.
They are studied amply by undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and practicing art critics. They are also rewarded generously by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), our official cultural institution. And the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) continues to honor the Filipinos who excel in the seven arts of the West. Those who excel in the indigenous arts and crafts, such as kulintang music and abaca weaving, receive kudos and monetary award of a lesser degree. These manifest the hierarchy in the arts. Copying the west still pays.
The situation can change only by showing through force of logic and adamantine data that there is much to admire in not completely westernized Pinoy pop art. i.e. indigenized Western cultural borrowings. Examples abound: our movies, OPM, romance, novels, TV shows
Millions enjoy our pop art. Millions spend viewing, listening to or reading them. That should be valid enough reason to study Pinoy pop art. In contrast, the Pinoy version of Western art is enjoyed, viewed, listened to, or read by only a very minor trickle of our population. But they, the Pinoy copies of Western art, take a dominant position -- in our textbooks, in our mass media, in the eyes of our own government. Not because they are Pinoy, but because they are copies of the West.
That says a lot about our educational system, our mass media, and our government. What is common to these three is this: they are manned, managed, and operated by the ingliserong Pinoy, the Filipinos who are proficient in the English language. By the elite, in short.
The communication loop of the Pinoy version of the seven arts of the West consists of the artist as producer of art works which are "consumed" by the viewer-listener-reader appreciator. The artist is a product of an educational system which is biased toward the West. The consumer is also shaped by the same system. The middle person critic who explains, explicates, expounds and praises the art work derives his livelihood and reputation from the loop. The loop passes on their preferences to those outside of it via the schools, the media and the relevant government institutions which are also owned or managed or operated by the same socio-economic class, the rich inglisero.
The only way to counter this vicious, oppressive set-up without bloodshed is to present an alternative view that is acceptable, because it is logical and is based on field data, and therefore, incontrovertible. The viciousness derives from its spitefulness to anyone and anything which does not belong to the loop. It also stems from its erroneous reasoning: any art which is not Western or like the West's is inferior.
There are those who belong to the loop who go slumming outside of their vicious circle so they can entertain their kind about having gone "native", and, oh, how so very iba (different) the natives are! Some get their paper thesis or dissertation data from the natives and score pogi points for their promotion and prestige. Of course, after short, sporadic forays into the land of the natives they return to their lovely homes and lovely offices in which they have been ensconced. Such are the habits of class, so very difficult to break because they are so very good.
The said loop is oppressive since it bears down on the rest of our population and keeps the latter subservient by harshness and coercion, though the means to achieve this can be subtle and, therefore, appear to be neither harsh nor coercive. That elite has been in power for centuries and knows all the tricks to stay unchallenged.
To study pop art is thus, for me, an act of self-liberation. Unfortunately, I am an opsi -- math and my road to freedom started only 18 years ago when I boldly turned my back to the ways of the academe, where I was employed, and took the first steps to know who we are and what we are like.
I have never looked back.
The only equipment I had were those which I acquired in the academe -- traditional criticism, neo-criticism; structuralism, a bit of post-structuralism. Quite very Western apparatus.
However, I had an abiding passion for linguistics, the study of the laws which govern languages, since 1958 when I first enrolled in M.A. Comparative Literature in UP. It was my way to our culture. Language was what I had as data and for this there was no need to go to the field.
PINOY TIME AND POP ART
Using language as the starting point, let us examine our concept of time and its relation to art, pop or otherwise. How did we divide time? From the smallest to the biggest: araw or day (which we broke into, beginning from dawn -- madaling araw (dawn); umaga (morning); tanghali (noon); hapon (afternoon); takip-silim (evening); gabi (night); kahapon (yesterday); ngayon (now, today); bukas (tomorrow); buwan (month); taon (year). There are compound expressions for the day before yesterday (noong isang araw) and the day after tomorrow (bukas makalawa). These are time indicators though just like kahapon, ngayon, and bukas.
Time as a quantity are, strictly speaking, indicated by araw, buwan, and taon. A numeral or counter can specify the number of the days, months or years -- e.g. isang araw, dalawang buwan, tatlong taon (one day, two months, three years). Or the length of time can be one-half (kalahati, kalahating buwan); a fortnight or whole -- buo, buong araw, buong umaga, buong gabi -- meaning the whole day, the whole morning, the whole night, respectively.
Time as a quantity which can be measured to the tick of a second or minutes or hours is a Spanish introduction, as the words indicating them immediately shows: segundo, minuto, oras. Relo came from Spanish reloj. We also call the watch orasan, the suffix -an is a Pinoy construction. It was the Americans though who introduce wrist watch for that to the Spaniards is reloj de pulsera. Our term for it is riswats.
Our sense of clock time and the idea that time has to be or can be measured to the briefest second are borrowed.
The millions of Filipinos who do not punch time cards or do not have deadlines to meet simply ignore watches, clock time, and measurements of time. They are more numerous than the Filipinos who are tied to and enslaved by time machines.
Since time is a measurable quantity, in a linear manner an action has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Transferred to fiction, a narrative image of life, then the Western plot must have a defined beginning, middle, and end. Rising action, climax and denouement are logical aspects of time as a quantity or length, which is an expression of quantity, which moves in a linear manner from time1 to time2 time3 and so on.
American fiction is specially action-oriented. Action pushes the story forward. Overt action also depicts the character of the protagonist, of course. Western fiction is plot-oriented because the protagonist is unraveled in time. The unraveling requires conflict which leads to rising action, climax, and denouement or resolution (of the conflict).
This plot as a structure fits aptly for it rose from the Western concept of time. The problem of adaptation rises when we realize that that is valid to them, the Español and the 'merkano, but not to us. For we have a different concept of time. And must therefore have a different approach to or ideas about plot line and narrative structure.
The epitome of the action -- oriented Western narrative is the whodunit or detective story. That genre never quite took roots here.
The Rambo series is interesting but our hero is FPJ who's low-key in comparison. And always has a sidekick. Hindi siya nag-iisa (he is not alone). Hero that FPJ is, he is never alone. There is Dencio Padilla who is forever loyal and a lady love.
There is the terrible aloneness of all the Western tragic heroes -- Oedipus, Macbeth, King Lear, Loman, the American salesman. They experience a fall. Rambo might be on a different trajectory. But they, as all Western heroes, are alone. Time is a linear path which they travel or traverse. A beginning, a middle, an end. Rising action, climax, denouement.
We have no such tragic heroes. No such terrible aloneness. FPJ, Juan Tamad, Dolphy. Unlike the Western heroes, our main protagonist is always connected -- to one other, a friend or a lady love; to several others -- parents, sibling, family. Not tragedy but comedy. Not rising action based on conflict but melodrama. Less height and less acute on angle but rolling hills and flatlands.
Look at their sentence constructions. An explicitly named subject and a predicate, an action word, and, if required, a recipient of the action e.g. "I love you." There's no other way to say this. In our case, "Mahal Kita": verb, pronoun. Where went "I"? Literally, these two words translate as "Love you" (and that is how we say it, "I love you"; the very Pinoy English of "Mahal kita").
The relationship comes first, mahal. Kita is the distinctive "exclusive dual", second person, plural number, nominative case, in many Philippine languages. It means "I-and-you (singular) only" and nobody else.
Still on relationship. "Kumain na ko. Kinain ko yong natira sa mesa." (I've eaten. I ate what was left on the table.) Kumain refers to who ate. Kinain to what was eaten. The infix (-um, -in) depends on whether the speaker is referring to himself as actor or the object of his action. Speaker-self, speaker-object. A verb for us reveals not so much who and action or who object of the action, but the what of the action. Relationship, in short.
Too, we are not conflict -- resolution driven. We shun away from confrontations. Put this relationship -- driven in the same linear time of the West and what would result is not tragedy but a comic, melodramatic story. In that time line (t-1, t2, t3) he'd seek not ako, the nominative case, first person, singular "I" but "I" in it's many relationships: Juan Tamad and the princess. FPJ and Dencio and a lady love or FPJ and a daughter like Judy Ann Santos, Dolphy and his family who resides in a "Home Along Da Riles" (home by the railroad tracks) -- ako in kita, tayo, and kami (tayo includes the person addressed; kami excludes the person addressed).
We borrowed the movie camera and we came out with Pinoy na Pinoy movies -- weak on the plot structure, abloom with deep and meaningful relationships even if there are bakbakan (fight) scenes. Emphasis on the relationships. With and through the movie camera we have been telling our own story.
So with our TV soap operas. So with our OPM. So with our romance novels.
It would be folly to demand Western standard on these very Pinoy pop arts. What we need is a canon of appreciation so we can "upgrade" our popular art to academic, aesthetic criticism. We direly need theories about ourselves so we can better appreciate our own art.
Our concept of time and our "I" -persona, of course, created and continues to create our own form of fiction, movies, TV soap operas. Our own art, which very unfortunately is dismissed as just merely pop by the inglisero critics. But in the end they don't matter. What they are there or not our own art will continue on.
Instead of rising action -- climax -- denouement we should graph our di-pagkakaunawaan misunderstanding and our tampuhan, for which there is no English word. For these are the stuff of our daily lives which are there already embodied and expressed in our popular art. It is in our popular art where we truly are.
From http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/culture_essays.htm, accessed May 6, 2007.
Anne of Green Gables Excerpt
Anne of Green Gables
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Chapter 7 - Anne Says Her Prayers
When Marilla took Anne up to bed that night she said stiffly:
"Now, Anne, I noticed last night that you threw your clothes all about the floor when you took them off. That is a very untidy habit, and I can't allow it at all. As soon as you take off any article of clothing fold it neatly and place it on the chair. I haven't any use at all for little girls who aren't neat."
"I was so harrowed up in my mind last night that I didn't think about my clothes at all," said Anne. "I'll fold them nicely tonight. They always made us do that at the asylum. Half the time, though, I'd forget, I'd be in such a hurry to get into bed nice and quiet and imagine things."
"You'll have to remember a little better if you stay here," admonished Marilla. "There, that looks something like. Say your prayers now and get into bed."
"I never say any prayers," announced Anne.
Marilla looked horrified astonishment.
"Why, Anne, what do you mean? Were you never taught to say your prayers? God always wants little girls to say their prayers. Don't you know who God is, Anne?"
"`God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth,'" responded Anne promptly and glibly.
Marilla looked rather relieved.
"So you do know something then, thank goodness! You're not quite a heathen. Where did you learn that?"
"Oh, at the asylum Sunday-school. They made us learn the whole catechism. I liked it pretty well. There's something splendid about some of the words. `Infinite, eternal and unchangeable.' Isn't that grand? It has such a roll to it--just like a big organ playing. You couldn't quite call it poetry, I suppose, but it sounds a lot like it, doesn't it?"
"We're not talking about poetry, Anne--we are talking about saying your prayers. Don't you know it's a terrible wicked thing not to say your prayers every night? I'm afraid you are a very bad little girl."
"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is. Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red ON PURPOSE, and I've never cared about Him since. And anyhow I'd always be too tired at night to bother saying prayers. People who have to look after twins can't be expected to say their prayers. Now, do you honestly think they can?"
Marilla decided that Anne's religious training must be begun at once. Plainly there was no time to be lost.
"You must say your prayers while you are under my roof, Anne."
"Why, of course, if you want me to," assented Anne cheerfully. "I'd do anything to oblige you. But you'll have to tell me what to say for this once. After I get into bed I'll imagine out a real nice prayer to say always. I believe that it will be quite interesting, now that I come to think of it."
"You must kneel down," said Marilla in embarrassment.
Anne knelt at Marilla's knee and looked up gravely.
"Why must people kneel down to pray?" If I really wanted to pray I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I'd look up into the sky--up--up--up--into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just FEEL a prayer. Well, I'm ready. What am I to say?"
Marilla felt more embarrassed than ever. She had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, "Now I lay me down to sleep." But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor--which is simply another name for a sense of fitness of things; and it suddenly occurred to her that that simple little prayer, sacred to white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing bout God's love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.
"You're old enough to pray for yourself, Anne," she said finally. "Just thank God for your blessings and ask Him humbly for the things you want."
"Well, I'll do my best," promised Anne, burying her face in Marilla's lap. "Gracious heavenly Father--that's the way the ministers say it in church, so I suppose it's all right in private prayer, isn't it?" she interjected, lifting her head for a moment.
"Gracious heavenly Father, I thank Thee for the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters and Bonny and the Snow Queen. I'm really extremely grateful for them. And that's all the blessings I can think of just now to thank Thee for. As for the things I want, they're so numerous that it would take a great deal of time to name them all so I will only mention the two most important. Please let me stay at Green Gables; and please let me be good-looking when I grow up. I remain, "Yours respectfully, Anne Shirley.
"There, did I do all right?" she asked eagerly, getting up. "I could have made it much more flowery if I'd had a little more time to think it over."
Poor Marilla was only preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was responsible for this extraordinary petition. She tucked the child up in bed, mentally vowing that she should be taught a prayer the very next day, and was leaving the room with the light when Anne called her back.
"I've just thought of it now. I should have said, `Amen' in place of `yours respectfully,' shouldn't I?--the way the ministers do. I'd forgotten it, but I felt a prayer should be finished off in some way, so I put in the other. Do you suppose it will make any difference?"
"I--I don't suppose it will," said Marilla. "Go to sleep now like a good child. Good night."
"I can only say good night tonight with a clear conscience," said Anne, cuddling luxuriously down among her pillows.
Marilla retreated to the kitchen, set the candle firmly on the table, and glared at Matthew.
"Matthew Cuthbert, it's about time somebody adopted that child and taught her something. She's next door to a perfect heathen. Will you believe that she never said a prayer in her life till tonight? I'll send her to the manse tomorrow and borrow the Peep of the Day series, that's what I'll do. And she shall go to Sunday-school just as soon as I can get some suitable clothes made for her. I foresee that I shall have my hands full. Well, well, we can't get through this world without our share of trouble. I've had a pretty easy life of it so far, but my time has come at last and I suppose I'll just have to make the best of it."
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. Project Gutenburg. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=34671&pageno=5. Accessed May 6, 2007.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Chapter 7 - Anne Says Her Prayers
When Marilla took Anne up to bed that night she said stiffly:
"Now, Anne, I noticed last night that you threw your clothes all about the floor when you took them off. That is a very untidy habit, and I can't allow it at all. As soon as you take off any article of clothing fold it neatly and place it on the chair. I haven't any use at all for little girls who aren't neat."
"I was so harrowed up in my mind last night that I didn't think about my clothes at all," said Anne. "I'll fold them nicely tonight. They always made us do that at the asylum. Half the time, though, I'd forget, I'd be in such a hurry to get into bed nice and quiet and imagine things."
"You'll have to remember a little better if you stay here," admonished Marilla. "There, that looks something like. Say your prayers now and get into bed."
"I never say any prayers," announced Anne.
Marilla looked horrified astonishment.
"Why, Anne, what do you mean? Were you never taught to say your prayers? God always wants little girls to say their prayers. Don't you know who God is, Anne?"
"`God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth,'" responded Anne promptly and glibly.
Marilla looked rather relieved.
"So you do know something then, thank goodness! You're not quite a heathen. Where did you learn that?"
"Oh, at the asylum Sunday-school. They made us learn the whole catechism. I liked it pretty well. There's something splendid about some of the words. `Infinite, eternal and unchangeable.' Isn't that grand? It has such a roll to it--just like a big organ playing. You couldn't quite call it poetry, I suppose, but it sounds a lot like it, doesn't it?"
"We're not talking about poetry, Anne--we are talking about saying your prayers. Don't you know it's a terrible wicked thing not to say your prayers every night? I'm afraid you are a very bad little girl."
"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is. Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red ON PURPOSE, and I've never cared about Him since. And anyhow I'd always be too tired at night to bother saying prayers. People who have to look after twins can't be expected to say their prayers. Now, do you honestly think they can?"
Marilla decided that Anne's religious training must be begun at once. Plainly there was no time to be lost.
"You must say your prayers while you are under my roof, Anne."
"Why, of course, if you want me to," assented Anne cheerfully. "I'd do anything to oblige you. But you'll have to tell me what to say for this once. After I get into bed I'll imagine out a real nice prayer to say always. I believe that it will be quite interesting, now that I come to think of it."
"You must kneel down," said Marilla in embarrassment.
Anne knelt at Marilla's knee and looked up gravely.
"Why must people kneel down to pray?" If I really wanted to pray I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I'd look up into the sky--up--up--up--into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just FEEL a prayer. Well, I'm ready. What am I to say?"
Marilla felt more embarrassed than ever. She had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, "Now I lay me down to sleep." But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor--which is simply another name for a sense of fitness of things; and it suddenly occurred to her that that simple little prayer, sacred to white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing bout God's love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.
"You're old enough to pray for yourself, Anne," she said finally. "Just thank God for your blessings and ask Him humbly for the things you want."
"Well, I'll do my best," promised Anne, burying her face in Marilla's lap. "Gracious heavenly Father--that's the way the ministers say it in church, so I suppose it's all right in private prayer, isn't it?" she interjected, lifting her head for a moment.
"Gracious heavenly Father, I thank Thee for the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters and Bonny and the Snow Queen. I'm really extremely grateful for them. And that's all the blessings I can think of just now to thank Thee for. As for the things I want, they're so numerous that it would take a great deal of time to name them all so I will only mention the two most important. Please let me stay at Green Gables; and please let me be good-looking when I grow up. I remain, "Yours respectfully, Anne Shirley.
"There, did I do all right?" she asked eagerly, getting up. "I could have made it much more flowery if I'd had a little more time to think it over."
Poor Marilla was only preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was responsible for this extraordinary petition. She tucked the child up in bed, mentally vowing that she should be taught a prayer the very next day, and was leaving the room with the light when Anne called her back.
"I've just thought of it now. I should have said, `Amen' in place of `yours respectfully,' shouldn't I?--the way the ministers do. I'd forgotten it, but I felt a prayer should be finished off in some way, so I put in the other. Do you suppose it will make any difference?"
"I--I don't suppose it will," said Marilla. "Go to sleep now like a good child. Good night."
"I can only say good night tonight with a clear conscience," said Anne, cuddling luxuriously down among her pillows.
Marilla retreated to the kitchen, set the candle firmly on the table, and glared at Matthew.
"Matthew Cuthbert, it's about time somebody adopted that child and taught her something. She's next door to a perfect heathen. Will you believe that she never said a prayer in her life till tonight? I'll send her to the manse tomorrow and borrow the Peep of the Day series, that's what I'll do. And she shall go to Sunday-school just as soon as I can get some suitable clothes made for her. I foresee that I shall have my hands full. Well, well, we can't get through this world without our share of trouble. I've had a pretty easy life of it so far, but my time has come at last and I suppose I'll just have to make the best of it."
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. Project Gutenburg. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=34671&pageno=5. Accessed May 6, 2007.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Excerpt
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow
A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever flushing round a summer sky. Castle of Indolence.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.
The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.
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Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.
I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water, which border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom…
(Ichabod Craine, a ridiculous figure of a schoolmaster in this tiny village, is invited to a large gathering at the farm-holding of one of the foremost men of the county, Herr Van Tassell)
It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory- nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble field.
The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking from bush to bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them. There was the honest cockrobin, the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering blackbirds flying in sable clouds, and the golden- winged woodpecker with his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedar-bird, with its red tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail and its little monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb, in his gay light blue coat and white underclothes, screaming and chattering, nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with every songster of the grove.
As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples: some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty- pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slap-jacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.
Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and "sugared suppositions," he journeyed along the sides of a range of hills which look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson. The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down in the west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shallow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid- heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.
It was toward evening that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Heer Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the adjacent country Old farmers, a spare leathern- faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles. Their brisk, withered little dames, in close crimped caps, long waisted short-gowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and pin-cushions, and gay calico pockets hanging on the outside. Buxom lasses, almost as antiquated as their mothers, excepting where a straw hat, a fine ribbon, or perhaps a white frock, gave symptoms of city innovation. The sons, in short square-skirted coats, with rows of stupendous brass buttons, and their hair generally queued in the fashion of the times, especially if they could procure an eelskin for the purpose, it being esteemed throughout the country as a potent nourisher and strengthener of the hair.
Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. From http://irving.thefreelibrary.com/Legend-Of-Sleepy-Hollow. Accessed May 6, 2007
A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever flushing round a summer sky. Castle of Indolence.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.
The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.
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Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.
I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water, which border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom…
(Ichabod Craine, a ridiculous figure of a schoolmaster in this tiny village, is invited to a large gathering at the farm-holding of one of the foremost men of the county, Herr Van Tassell)
It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory- nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble field.
The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking from bush to bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them. There was the honest cockrobin, the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering blackbirds flying in sable clouds, and the golden- winged woodpecker with his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedar-bird, with its red tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail and its little monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb, in his gay light blue coat and white underclothes, screaming and chattering, nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with every songster of the grove.
As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples: some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty- pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slap-jacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.
Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and "sugared suppositions," he journeyed along the sides of a range of hills which look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson. The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down in the west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shallow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid- heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.
It was toward evening that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Heer Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the adjacent country Old farmers, a spare leathern- faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles. Their brisk, withered little dames, in close crimped caps, long waisted short-gowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and pin-cushions, and gay calico pockets hanging on the outside. Buxom lasses, almost as antiquated as their mothers, excepting where a straw hat, a fine ribbon, or perhaps a white frock, gave symptoms of city innovation. The sons, in short square-skirted coats, with rows of stupendous brass buttons, and their hair generally queued in the fashion of the times, especially if they could procure an eelskin for the purpose, it being esteemed throughout the country as a potent nourisher and strengthener of the hair.
Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. From http://irving.thefreelibrary.com/Legend-Of-Sleepy-Hollow. Accessed May 6, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Major Question "Mapping the Fantastic"
As you read through our various readings this week (please prioritize: 1. Sanes, 2. Prester John, 3. Alice, 4. Swift!) please consider the following:
How do we draw and redraw our cultural hopes and dreams through popular media? How does popular media at the same time shape our hopes/dreams/even our reality? How might we infer cultural realities (dreams, hopes, fears, social structures, gender roles, etc.) from 'fantastic' stories?
How do we draw and redraw our cultural hopes and dreams through popular media? How does popular media at the same time shape our hopes/dreams/even our reality? How might we infer cultural realities (dreams, hopes, fears, social structures, gender roles, etc.) from 'fantastic' stories?
Sanes: A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out
Robert Stoller, Sigmund Freud and Heinz Kohut provide essential insights into the way contemporary entertainment lets us act out fantasies and desires.
A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out
In a rundown section of downtown Boston, inside a partially abandoned building, one can find an indoor playing field for a combat simulation game known as paintball. The playing field consists of two large rooms splattered with paint on the walls and concrete floors. Free-standing wooden barriers have been placed at random in both rooms to provide players with something to hide behind when their opponents fire at them.
Players divide into two teams and take positions behind the barriers. Each player is equipped with a protective suit, including knee pads and goggles, along with an air-powered gun that shoots "paintballs" or gum ball-sized gelatin capsules filled with paint. When a game begins, players proceed to fire at each other with their air guns in an attempt to eliminate opponents or capture something on the other team's territory. When players are hit by one of the paintballs, they feel a pinch as it explodes and "bleeds" on their clothes and skin. They are then officially "dead" and have to wait out the rest of the game.
Paintball is one of a growing number of combat simulations that turn the mock gunfights of childhood into adult and adolescent war games, by paring down the elements of battle to a number of essentials: combatants with guns, an opportunity to run around, and places to protect oneself from enemy fire. In effect, it retains the form of a battle but not the substance, offering players a reenactment that lacks the stakes or physical injury of genuine combat.
There are similar indoor and indoor playing fields for paintball around the United States and a burgeoning subculture with its own tournaments and heroes. There is also a growing arsenal of air-powered guns that can be purchased by players, which parallels the fascination with real guns in the larger society.
Paintball is an example of a new kind of symbolic arena that now characterizes popular culture. By way of a preliminary definition, symbolic arenas are protected domains that make it possible for people to act out fantasies, embodying their fears and desires, in ways that aren't possible in everyday life. The settings, situations and actions they are created out of, are lifelike representations -- fictions -- masquerading as something authentic.
Some symbolic arenas make it possible for participants to directly play out fantasies, either by engaging in physical action and role playing, or by manipulating images or objects that represent them. In addition to paintball, examples of these "high-interaction" simulations include laser tag; video and computer games; interactive movies; some rain forest exhibits in zoos; virtual realities; board games; pinball; children's toys; sexual role playing; interactive computer pornography; voice acting on 900 numbers; and so-called MUDs on the Internet, in which people play roles in fictional worlds created with text descriptions instead of images.
Other symbolic arenas place the audience in a more passive role, in which it is taken for a ride or watches, and identifies with, characters who do things in fictional situations. These include television, traditional movies and the theater, amusement park rides and the more recent movie rides.
What kinds of fantasies do participants reenact in symbolic arenas? As in theme parks, they experience the illusion of transcendence, not only from time and space, but from the roles they play in society. They become part of stories that are larger and more interesting than those in everyday life. The adolescent video game player becomes a space pilot trying to save the universe; the child becomes a parent ministering to a doll that acts as a surrogate child; the television viewer, acting vicariously through the character of the detective, solves the crime and defends the moral order of society.
Symbolic arenas also provide participants with a sense of mastery and safety by showing us characters, or allowing us to play characters, with various abilities and forms of power. Through these characters, we then reenact the universal story line that is common to all fiction: danger and obstacles are faced, but we, or the characters we identify with, win in the end.
Thus, one can say that many symbolic arenas are acts of self- and world-repair: they allow us to face and overcome simulated dangers and problems, which are a more exciting version of what we face in everyday life. In these characteristics, they are similar to daydreams, in which we convert our defeats into victories and our losses into gains to bolster the sense of safety and self-esteem.
What Dr. Robert Stoller, a psychoanalytic theorist who looked at the way the mind creates scripts, said about art, daydreams and pornography, is true of all symbolic arenas. They allow us to convert personal trauma into "simulated trauma, mastered trauma," he said. And they create aesthetic excitement by presenting fictional dangers that seem real, while allowing us to control the production to be certain it isn't real.
"...aesthetics is like a game," Stoller wrote "Like chess or football, it simulates by manipulating the symbols of danger."*
In addition to letting us master trauma and danger, and escape the limits of physical reality, symbolic arenas also allow us to play out every other kind of desire we know from psychoanalytic theory and everyday life. Power, phallic aggression, revenge, sex, love and success are routinely acted out and temporarily sated in these fictional worlds.
Symbolic arenas, based on these principles, now define popular culture, which is becoming a giant arcade that draws everyone into its lifelike fictions. Overseeing it, we once again find growing numbers of designers and fabricators who take images and ideas from nature, history, the contemporary world and their own imaginations. They convert these into forms of entertainment, which make it possible for millions of people to act out personal and collective fears and desires in artificial worlds.
Like all entrepreneurs, the creators of symbolic arenas find and exploit market niches, designing story lines for specific personality constellations. In so doing, they have turned popular culture into a vast inventory of the fears and desires of the human personality.
Here are some examples of symbolic arenas:
* Video games provide a realm of virtual action in which players can incarnate in fictional worlds by manipulating image surrogates on the screen. Players choose from a selection of imaginary adventures that are, for the most part, the same as those found in television, movies and theme parks. Like those other forms of entertainment, video games offer simulations of journeys to exotic places, of space travel, of futuristic battles and one-on-one combat, to name a few well-known examples. And like them, video games let players experience a sense of transcendence from time and space, and from the roles that players routinely find themselves in, in everyday life.
But behind all these fictional roles and situations, many games are intended to make it possible for adolescent males to act out a limited set of desires that are central to their psychology, involving phallic aggression, competition, strength, the display of masculinity and conquest. This is a hormone-saturated simulation in which competition dominates and almost everything is an arena for a contest or fight. These basic desires may be dressed up in exotic situations but, in the end, the fantasies being acted out are very mundane.
Video games similarly allow players to express anger, hostility and desires for revenge, which are blended in with desires to express phallic aggression (as they are in life, in general) in the experience of destroying things on the screen.
As a 14-year-old player I interviewed for a newspaper story in 1983 put it: "It's a way, if you're mad, to get rid of your tensions. You can blow up wave after wave of spaceships."
His friend then added: "If you keep all this tension inside you, you can go crazy" -- a statement that says a good deal about the role of symbolic arenas in the lives of young people.
But what is unique about video games is that players are spectators, manipulators of the simulation and participants at the same time, controlling image surrogates that represent them on the screen, and acting in the virtual environment through their surrogate. In their role as spectators and manipulators, they watch and dominate the action. In their role as participants, they experience these image surrogates as an extension, not only of their will, but of their body. In essence, their body image expands to include the image under their control, allowing them to take on a virtual presence in the game, as part of their fictional role.
An example of how this division works can be seen in the way players act out a set of desires described by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Kohut said that children have the need to idealize the perceived greatness of adults, on the one hand, and they also need to have their own sense of grandiosity mirrored back to them, by having other people admire them. In effect, they need to admire and be admired -- needs that are carried into adolescence and adulthood, and acted out in various ways throughout life.
We can see these desires vividly expressed in video games, where players manipulate all those images of overdeveloped fighters and super-powered machines, so they experience themselves as having a kind of virtual body, full of strength and firepower, which express fantasies that they have grandiose physical selves. At the same time, because this virtual body is separate from them, they can admire it as if it is another person. The games thus provide a unique way for players to admire and be admired at the same time: the games are mirrors that reflect a grander self back to the player.
But the expression of these desires doesn't remain hermetically sealed inside the simulation, because playing video games can also be a form of social interaction in which players test their skills against each other and experience victory. In the game Sega Daytona USA, six players sit lined up in seats in front of six screens, all of which display the same virtual roadway. Each player is assigned the image of a car as his surrogate self. Each must navigate his car on this same virtual road, on which the images of cars controlled by the other players are also displayed, allowing players to try to bump each other off the road and see when their competitors pass them in the race.
This is a game of speed, competition, and violence. One can see in the players' expressions, the excitement of the chase, coupled with the enjoyment of bumping and knocking the cars controlled by their friends, so they will go off the road. The game is the equivalent of a wrestling match between adolescent males to see who will come out on top, but here transposed into a virtual world of images with a more exciting story line.
We can thus see in video games, the way basic elements of personality are acted out in a virtual world. Players experience excitement by facing and overcoming fictional dangers and obstacles; they experience greatness and victory, and enact phallic and aggressive urges; they learn tasks and have accomplishments, in which they win against the machine and other players, and they have opportunities to impress friends and confirm social standing, all of it made more exciting by the simulation, which makes it seem they are doing all this in ways that transcend the usual limits of life.
Just as there are a limited number of desires being expressed in the manifold story lines, so video games also operate almost entirely according to one basic principle: the player's surrogate self must come into contact with or avoid contact with other images. This is a world that moves as a result of a mock physical causality rather than according to the complex meanings of plot. This simple pattern of operation is able to generate so many possibilities because of the diversity of images and story lines; in other words, because of the richness of the simulation.
* Another kind of symbolic arena makes its appearance every Halloween, when theme parks modeled after horror movies pop up in many cities, using stage sets, props, costumed actors, animatronic figures and other special effects to create nightmare worlds full of ghoulish delights. Typical sights encountered by visitors include mutant creatures writhing in agony; zombies wandering the grounds; scenes of torture, and disembodied heads.
These haunted environments allow visitors to play the role of victims of evil, creating a fictional risk in which they survive to tell the tale. Visitors encounter their own nightmares and the kind of fantasized monsters that, as children, they imagined were hiding in the closet or under the bed at night. The excitement is in the fact that it looks dangerous and terrible, but isn't. As in video games, visitors win in the end, in this case by demonstrating to themselves that the evil that is portrayed is harmless after all.
* Toys provide another kind of symbolic arena, aimed at the developmental level and gender of children. Typically, the toys are used as props, which allow children to lose themselves in the dramas of play, acting out issues that are central to their stage of development. For girls, there are plastic reproductions of stoves, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and other appliances, and lifelike dolls that talk, walk, cry, and offer (surprisingly explicit) opportunities to act out issues that revolve around toilet training. For boys, there are more opportunities to act out phallic aggression, with plastic guns and action figures, much of it spun off from the science fiction fantasies of the movies.
Like many other symbolic areas, toys are becoming strikingly realistic, resulting in such strange cultural objects as a lifelike imitation of Burger King Restaurant Food, which lets children stack plastic burger, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle on a plastic bun. Walking through toy stores, today, one finds oneself in a simulation bazaar lined with boxes, each trying to lure would-be customers with claims that they contain an imitation that is so realistic, the buyer won't be able to distinguish it from the real thing.
------
How are symbolic arenas created?
Using an analogy to the psychoanalytic idea of dreamwork, one might refer to the process by which these invented worlds are spun out of our minds as simulation-work. Simulation-work involves everything that is done by artists and those in the entertainment industry to make simulations as realistic possible. But it also involves the way all of this is completed by audiences and participants, who spontaneously suspend disbelief and work to enhance the lifelikeness of the experiences. Thus, the creators of paintball provide players with barriers and imitation guns; it is the players who complete the simulation, running around like they are soldiers in battle.
Simulation-work also has another element discussed, to some degree, by Stoller: making certain the simulation isn't so real that it creates a physical danger to participants or compromises their moral identities. And it involves making the simulation unlike reality in ways that enhance the aesthetic experience, for example, by condensing the events portrayed into a brief period of time or making them all relate to the story.
Finally, it involves the process that makes it possible for these invented worlds to embody narratives and images that express and disguise our fears and desires. In short, the creators of all kinds of fiction start off with fears and desires. which are invested in cognitive schemas or models of themselves and their surroundings. They then take hold of whatever raw materials are available (words, paint, computers, etc) and whatever artistic techniques their culture offers (or that they can develop) and they spin those schemas into imaginary worlds that let us act out what is on our minds.
The history of art and entertainment is the history of advances in the techniques and technology of simulation-work, from stories told around the campfire and paintings on cave walls to contemporary movies, Disney World, and Back to the Future...The Ride. Today, those advances are enhancing the realism of our invented worlds; expanding our opportunities to experience physical, sensory and psychological immersion in our invented worlds; and allowing for more participation in the simulation. In place of looking at an imitation of life, we increasingly find ourselves inside one. In place of identifying with the characters, we increasingly are the characters. In place of merely enjoying scripted stories, we have more opportunities to create part or all of the story as we go along. And in place of imagining a relationship with various characters, we increasingly interact with them.
This change is resulting giving us a new kind of fiction that only existed in an undeveloped form, before. Whereas traditional literature and drama allow us to see characters with all kinds of abilities and desires, this new kind of fiction creates the illusion that we have these abilities and desires, ourselves. The manufactured experiences of art cease to be merely vicarious and happen to us directly.
But this culture of acting out environments that refer to various meanings in ourselves, comes with a number of dangers. One is that we will act out issues that are central to our personalities and culture, in disguised form, in place of becoming aware of them. As Freud said, we can reenact the traumas of the past or we can remember them. But we can't do both at once because the reenactment is a defense against remembering. In other words, popular culture is, in part, the ultimate stealth simulation. It is a maze of forgetting, a road away from the truth of the self, even as it also expresses the self in disguised ways.
There is also the danger that this culture will draw us into fields of engagement in which nothing is at stake. It invites us to stand at a remove from things; to act decisively when the stakes aren't real and when there is no danger that we will make a true mistake. It encourages us to encounter other people only through mediations -- computer images, voices, and so on -- and to interact with fictional characters in place of people, so we are protected from intimacy or the judgment of others. Behind the facade of daring exploits and journeys, it offers a reality in which we always play it safe. Simulation, the ultimate imitation of life, becomes a wall that stands between us and the true experience of life.
*Robert J. Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985) pp. 58-61.
Ken Sanes. Transparency. “A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out.”Accessed April 29, 2007. http://www.transparencynow.com/actout.htm.
A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out
In a rundown section of downtown Boston, inside a partially abandoned building, one can find an indoor playing field for a combat simulation game known as paintball. The playing field consists of two large rooms splattered with paint on the walls and concrete floors. Free-standing wooden barriers have been placed at random in both rooms to provide players with something to hide behind when their opponents fire at them.
Players divide into two teams and take positions behind the barriers. Each player is equipped with a protective suit, including knee pads and goggles, along with an air-powered gun that shoots "paintballs" or gum ball-sized gelatin capsules filled with paint. When a game begins, players proceed to fire at each other with their air guns in an attempt to eliminate opponents or capture something on the other team's territory. When players are hit by one of the paintballs, they feel a pinch as it explodes and "bleeds" on their clothes and skin. They are then officially "dead" and have to wait out the rest of the game.
Paintball is one of a growing number of combat simulations that turn the mock gunfights of childhood into adult and adolescent war games, by paring down the elements of battle to a number of essentials: combatants with guns, an opportunity to run around, and places to protect oneself from enemy fire. In effect, it retains the form of a battle but not the substance, offering players a reenactment that lacks the stakes or physical injury of genuine combat.
There are similar indoor and indoor playing fields for paintball around the United States and a burgeoning subculture with its own tournaments and heroes. There is also a growing arsenal of air-powered guns that can be purchased by players, which parallels the fascination with real guns in the larger society.
Paintball is an example of a new kind of symbolic arena that now characterizes popular culture. By way of a preliminary definition, symbolic arenas are protected domains that make it possible for people to act out fantasies, embodying their fears and desires, in ways that aren't possible in everyday life. The settings, situations and actions they are created out of, are lifelike representations -- fictions -- masquerading as something authentic.
Some symbolic arenas make it possible for participants to directly play out fantasies, either by engaging in physical action and role playing, or by manipulating images or objects that represent them. In addition to paintball, examples of these "high-interaction" simulations include laser tag; video and computer games; interactive movies; some rain forest exhibits in zoos; virtual realities; board games; pinball; children's toys; sexual role playing; interactive computer pornography; voice acting on 900 numbers; and so-called MUDs on the Internet, in which people play roles in fictional worlds created with text descriptions instead of images.
Other symbolic arenas place the audience in a more passive role, in which it is taken for a ride or watches, and identifies with, characters who do things in fictional situations. These include television, traditional movies and the theater, amusement park rides and the more recent movie rides.
What kinds of fantasies do participants reenact in symbolic arenas? As in theme parks, they experience the illusion of transcendence, not only from time and space, but from the roles they play in society. They become part of stories that are larger and more interesting than those in everyday life. The adolescent video game player becomes a space pilot trying to save the universe; the child becomes a parent ministering to a doll that acts as a surrogate child; the television viewer, acting vicariously through the character of the detective, solves the crime and defends the moral order of society.
Symbolic arenas also provide participants with a sense of mastery and safety by showing us characters, or allowing us to play characters, with various abilities and forms of power. Through these characters, we then reenact the universal story line that is common to all fiction: danger and obstacles are faced, but we, or the characters we identify with, win in the end.
Thus, one can say that many symbolic arenas are acts of self- and world-repair: they allow us to face and overcome simulated dangers and problems, which are a more exciting version of what we face in everyday life. In these characteristics, they are similar to daydreams, in which we convert our defeats into victories and our losses into gains to bolster the sense of safety and self-esteem.
What Dr. Robert Stoller, a psychoanalytic theorist who looked at the way the mind creates scripts, said about art, daydreams and pornography, is true of all symbolic arenas. They allow us to convert personal trauma into "simulated trauma, mastered trauma," he said. And they create aesthetic excitement by presenting fictional dangers that seem real, while allowing us to control the production to be certain it isn't real.
"...aesthetics is like a game," Stoller wrote "Like chess or football, it simulates by manipulating the symbols of danger."*
In addition to letting us master trauma and danger, and escape the limits of physical reality, symbolic arenas also allow us to play out every other kind of desire we know from psychoanalytic theory and everyday life. Power, phallic aggression, revenge, sex, love and success are routinely acted out and temporarily sated in these fictional worlds.
Symbolic arenas, based on these principles, now define popular culture, which is becoming a giant arcade that draws everyone into its lifelike fictions. Overseeing it, we once again find growing numbers of designers and fabricators who take images and ideas from nature, history, the contemporary world and their own imaginations. They convert these into forms of entertainment, which make it possible for millions of people to act out personal and collective fears and desires in artificial worlds.
Like all entrepreneurs, the creators of symbolic arenas find and exploit market niches, designing story lines for specific personality constellations. In so doing, they have turned popular culture into a vast inventory of the fears and desires of the human personality.
Here are some examples of symbolic arenas:
* Video games provide a realm of virtual action in which players can incarnate in fictional worlds by manipulating image surrogates on the screen. Players choose from a selection of imaginary adventures that are, for the most part, the same as those found in television, movies and theme parks. Like those other forms of entertainment, video games offer simulations of journeys to exotic places, of space travel, of futuristic battles and one-on-one combat, to name a few well-known examples. And like them, video games let players experience a sense of transcendence from time and space, and from the roles that players routinely find themselves in, in everyday life.
But behind all these fictional roles and situations, many games are intended to make it possible for adolescent males to act out a limited set of desires that are central to their psychology, involving phallic aggression, competition, strength, the display of masculinity and conquest. This is a hormone-saturated simulation in which competition dominates and almost everything is an arena for a contest or fight. These basic desires may be dressed up in exotic situations but, in the end, the fantasies being acted out are very mundane.
Video games similarly allow players to express anger, hostility and desires for revenge, which are blended in with desires to express phallic aggression (as they are in life, in general) in the experience of destroying things on the screen.
As a 14-year-old player I interviewed for a newspaper story in 1983 put it: "It's a way, if you're mad, to get rid of your tensions. You can blow up wave after wave of spaceships."
His friend then added: "If you keep all this tension inside you, you can go crazy" -- a statement that says a good deal about the role of symbolic arenas in the lives of young people.
But what is unique about video games is that players are spectators, manipulators of the simulation and participants at the same time, controlling image surrogates that represent them on the screen, and acting in the virtual environment through their surrogate. In their role as spectators and manipulators, they watch and dominate the action. In their role as participants, they experience these image surrogates as an extension, not only of their will, but of their body. In essence, their body image expands to include the image under their control, allowing them to take on a virtual presence in the game, as part of their fictional role.
An example of how this division works can be seen in the way players act out a set of desires described by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Kohut said that children have the need to idealize the perceived greatness of adults, on the one hand, and they also need to have their own sense of grandiosity mirrored back to them, by having other people admire them. In effect, they need to admire and be admired -- needs that are carried into adolescence and adulthood, and acted out in various ways throughout life.
We can see these desires vividly expressed in video games, where players manipulate all those images of overdeveloped fighters and super-powered machines, so they experience themselves as having a kind of virtual body, full of strength and firepower, which express fantasies that they have grandiose physical selves. At the same time, because this virtual body is separate from them, they can admire it as if it is another person. The games thus provide a unique way for players to admire and be admired at the same time: the games are mirrors that reflect a grander self back to the player.
But the expression of these desires doesn't remain hermetically sealed inside the simulation, because playing video games can also be a form of social interaction in which players test their skills against each other and experience victory. In the game Sega Daytona USA, six players sit lined up in seats in front of six screens, all of which display the same virtual roadway. Each player is assigned the image of a car as his surrogate self. Each must navigate his car on this same virtual road, on which the images of cars controlled by the other players are also displayed, allowing players to try to bump each other off the road and see when their competitors pass them in the race.
This is a game of speed, competition, and violence. One can see in the players' expressions, the excitement of the chase, coupled with the enjoyment of bumping and knocking the cars controlled by their friends, so they will go off the road. The game is the equivalent of a wrestling match between adolescent males to see who will come out on top, but here transposed into a virtual world of images with a more exciting story line.
We can thus see in video games, the way basic elements of personality are acted out in a virtual world. Players experience excitement by facing and overcoming fictional dangers and obstacles; they experience greatness and victory, and enact phallic and aggressive urges; they learn tasks and have accomplishments, in which they win against the machine and other players, and they have opportunities to impress friends and confirm social standing, all of it made more exciting by the simulation, which makes it seem they are doing all this in ways that transcend the usual limits of life.
Just as there are a limited number of desires being expressed in the manifold story lines, so video games also operate almost entirely according to one basic principle: the player's surrogate self must come into contact with or avoid contact with other images. This is a world that moves as a result of a mock physical causality rather than according to the complex meanings of plot. This simple pattern of operation is able to generate so many possibilities because of the diversity of images and story lines; in other words, because of the richness of the simulation.
* Another kind of symbolic arena makes its appearance every Halloween, when theme parks modeled after horror movies pop up in many cities, using stage sets, props, costumed actors, animatronic figures and other special effects to create nightmare worlds full of ghoulish delights. Typical sights encountered by visitors include mutant creatures writhing in agony; zombies wandering the grounds; scenes of torture, and disembodied heads.
These haunted environments allow visitors to play the role of victims of evil, creating a fictional risk in which they survive to tell the tale. Visitors encounter their own nightmares and the kind of fantasized monsters that, as children, they imagined were hiding in the closet or under the bed at night. The excitement is in the fact that it looks dangerous and terrible, but isn't. As in video games, visitors win in the end, in this case by demonstrating to themselves that the evil that is portrayed is harmless after all.
* Toys provide another kind of symbolic arena, aimed at the developmental level and gender of children. Typically, the toys are used as props, which allow children to lose themselves in the dramas of play, acting out issues that are central to their stage of development. For girls, there are plastic reproductions of stoves, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and other appliances, and lifelike dolls that talk, walk, cry, and offer (surprisingly explicit) opportunities to act out issues that revolve around toilet training. For boys, there are more opportunities to act out phallic aggression, with plastic guns and action figures, much of it spun off from the science fiction fantasies of the movies.
Like many other symbolic areas, toys are becoming strikingly realistic, resulting in such strange cultural objects as a lifelike imitation of Burger King Restaurant Food, which lets children stack plastic burger, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle on a plastic bun. Walking through toy stores, today, one finds oneself in a simulation bazaar lined with boxes, each trying to lure would-be customers with claims that they contain an imitation that is so realistic, the buyer won't be able to distinguish it from the real thing.
------
How are symbolic arenas created?
Using an analogy to the psychoanalytic idea of dreamwork, one might refer to the process by which these invented worlds are spun out of our minds as simulation-work. Simulation-work involves everything that is done by artists and those in the entertainment industry to make simulations as realistic possible. But it also involves the way all of this is completed by audiences and participants, who spontaneously suspend disbelief and work to enhance the lifelikeness of the experiences. Thus, the creators of paintball provide players with barriers and imitation guns; it is the players who complete the simulation, running around like they are soldiers in battle.
Simulation-work also has another element discussed, to some degree, by Stoller: making certain the simulation isn't so real that it creates a physical danger to participants or compromises their moral identities. And it involves making the simulation unlike reality in ways that enhance the aesthetic experience, for example, by condensing the events portrayed into a brief period of time or making them all relate to the story.
Finally, it involves the process that makes it possible for these invented worlds to embody narratives and images that express and disguise our fears and desires. In short, the creators of all kinds of fiction start off with fears and desires. which are invested in cognitive schemas or models of themselves and their surroundings. They then take hold of whatever raw materials are available (words, paint, computers, etc) and whatever artistic techniques their culture offers (or that they can develop) and they spin those schemas into imaginary worlds that let us act out what is on our minds.
The history of art and entertainment is the history of advances in the techniques and technology of simulation-work, from stories told around the campfire and paintings on cave walls to contemporary movies, Disney World, and Back to the Future...The Ride. Today, those advances are enhancing the realism of our invented worlds; expanding our opportunities to experience physical, sensory and psychological immersion in our invented worlds; and allowing for more participation in the simulation. In place of looking at an imitation of life, we increasingly find ourselves inside one. In place of identifying with the characters, we increasingly are the characters. In place of merely enjoying scripted stories, we have more opportunities to create part or all of the story as we go along. And in place of imagining a relationship with various characters, we increasingly interact with them.
This change is resulting giving us a new kind of fiction that only existed in an undeveloped form, before. Whereas traditional literature and drama allow us to see characters with all kinds of abilities and desires, this new kind of fiction creates the illusion that we have these abilities and desires, ourselves. The manufactured experiences of art cease to be merely vicarious and happen to us directly.
But this culture of acting out environments that refer to various meanings in ourselves, comes with a number of dangers. One is that we will act out issues that are central to our personalities and culture, in disguised form, in place of becoming aware of them. As Freud said, we can reenact the traumas of the past or we can remember them. But we can't do both at once because the reenactment is a defense against remembering. In other words, popular culture is, in part, the ultimate stealth simulation. It is a maze of forgetting, a road away from the truth of the self, even as it also expresses the self in disguised ways.
There is also the danger that this culture will draw us into fields of engagement in which nothing is at stake. It invites us to stand at a remove from things; to act decisively when the stakes aren't real and when there is no danger that we will make a true mistake. It encourages us to encounter other people only through mediations -- computer images, voices, and so on -- and to interact with fictional characters in place of people, so we are protected from intimacy or the judgment of others. Behind the facade of daring exploits and journeys, it offers a reality in which we always play it safe. Simulation, the ultimate imitation of life, becomes a wall that stands between us and the true experience of life.
*Robert J. Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985) pp. 58-61.
Ken Sanes. Transparency. “A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out.”Accessed April 29, 2007. http://www.transparencynow.com/actout.htm.
The Letter of Prester John
The Letter of Prester John to the Prince of Constantinople, 1155(?) (12th c.)
…Should you desire to learn the greatness and excellency of our Exaltedness and of the land subject to our sceptre, then hear and believe: I, Presbyter Johannes, the Lord of Lords, surpass all under heaven in virtue, in riches, and in power; seventy-two kings pay us tribute ... In the three Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India, where rests the body of the holy apostle Thomas [Judas the Twin]; it reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends toward deserted Babylon near the Tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king, but all are tributary to us.
Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men -- men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals.
We have some people subject to us who feed on the flesh of men and of prematurely born animals, and who never fear death. When any of these people die, their friends and relations eat him ravenously, for they regard it as a main duty to munch human flesh. Their names are Gog, Magog, Anie, Agit, Azenach, Fommeperi, Befari, Conei-Samante, Agrimandri, Vintefolei, Casbei, and Alanei. Theses and similar nations were shut in behind lofty mountains by Alexander the Great, towards the north. We lead them at our pleasure against our foes, and neither man nor beast is left undevoured, if our Majesty gives the requisite permission. And when all our foes are eaten, then we return with our hosts home again.
These accursed fifteen [twelve?] nations will burst forth from the four quarters of the earth at the end of the world, in the times of the Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the saints as well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give to our son who will be born, alon with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls, Britain, and Scotland. We shall also give him Spain and all of the land as far as the icy sea.
The nations to which I have alluded, according to the words of the prophet, shall not stand in the judgement on account of their offensive practices, but will be consumed to ashes by a fire which will fall on them from heaven.
Our land streams with honey and is overflowing with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herd, nor does a querulous frog ever quack in it; no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide amongst the grass, not can any poisonous animals exist in it or injure anyone.
Among the heathen flows, through a certain province, the River Indus. Encircling Paradise, it spreads its arms in manifold windings through the entire province. Here are found the emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrsolites, onyxes, beryls, sardius, and other costly stones. Here grows the plant Assidos which, when worn by anyone, protects him from the evil spirit, forcing it to state its business and name -- consequently the foul spirits keep out of the way there. In a certain land subject to us all kinds of pepper is gathered and is exchanged for corn and bread, leather and cloth ...
At the foot of Mount Olympus bubbles up a spring which changes its flavor hour by hour, night and day, and the spring is scarcely three days' journey from Paradise, out of which Adam was driven. If anyone has tasted thrice of the fountain, from that day he will feel no fatigue, but will, as long as he lives, be as a man of thirty years. Here are found the small stones called Nudiosi which, if borne about the body, prevent the sight from waxing feeble and restore it where it is lost. The more the stone is looked at, the keener becomes the sight.
In our territory is a certain waterless sea consisting of tumbling billows of sand never at rest. None have crossed this sea -- it lacks water all together, yet fish of various kinds are cast up upon the beach, very tasty, and the like are nowhere else to be seen.
Three days' journey from this sea are mountains from which rolls down a stony, waterless river which opens into the sandy sea. As soon as the stream reaches the sea, its stones vanish in it and are never seen again. As long as the river is in motion, it cannout be crossed; only four days a week is it possible to traverse it.
Between the sandy sea and the said mountians, in a certain plain, is a fountain of singular virtue which purges Christians and would-be Christians from all transgressions. The water stands four inches high in a hollow stone shaped like a mussel-shell. Two saintly old men watch by it and ask the comers whether they are Christians or are about to become Christians, then whether they desire healing with all their hearts. If they have answered well, they are bidden to lay aside their clothes and to step into the mussel. If what they said be true, then the water begins to rise and gush over their heads. Thrice does the water thus lift itself, and everyone who has entered the mussel leaves it cured of every complaint.
Near the wilderness trickles between barren mountians a subterranean rill which can only by chance be reached, for only occassionally the earth gapes, and he who would descend must do it with precipitation, ere the earth closes again. All that is gathered under the ground there is gem and precious stone. The brook pours into another river and the inhabitants of the neighborhood obtain thence abundance of precious stones. Yet they never venture to sell them without having first offered them to us for our private use. Should we decline them, they are at liberty to dispose of them to strangers. Boys there are trained to remain three of four days under the water, diving after the stones.
Beyond the stone river are the ten tribes of Israel which, though subject to their own kings, are, for all that, tributary to our Majesty.
In one of our lands, hight Zone, are worms called salamanders. These worms can only live in fire, and they build cocoons like silk-worms which are unwound by the ladies of our palace and spun into cloth and dresses which are worn by our Exaltedness. These dresses, in order to be cleaned and washed, are cast into flames ...
When we go to war, we have fourteen golden and bejewelled crosses borne before us instead of banners. Each of these crosses is followed by ten thousand horsemen and one hundred thousand foot soldiers, fully armed, without reckoning those in charge of the luggage and provision.
When we ride abroad plainly we have a wooden, unadorned cross without gold or gems about it, borne before us in order that we meditate on the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ; also a golden bowl filled with earth to remind us of that whence we sprung and that to which we must return; but besides these there is borne a sliver bowl full of gold as a token to all that we are the Lord of Lords.
All riches, such as are upon the world, our Magnificence possesses in superabundance. With us, no one lies, for he who speaks a lie is thenceforth regarded as dead -- he is no more thought of or honored by us. No vice is tolerated by us. Every year we undertake a pilgrimage, with retinue of war, to the body of the holy prophet Daniel which is near the desolated site of Babylon. In out realm fishes are caught, the blood of which dyes purple. The Amazons and the Brahmins are subject to us.
The palace in which our Superemincency resides is built after the pattern of the castle built by the apostle Thomas [Judas the Twin] for the Indian king Gundoforus. Celings joists, and architrave are of Sethym wood, the roof ebony, which can never catch fire. Over the gable of the palace are, at the extremities, two golden apples, in each of which are two carbuncles, so that the gold may shine by day and the carbuncles by night. The greater gates of the palace are of sardius with the horn of the horned snake inwrought so that no one can bring poison within. The other portals are of ebony; the windows are of crystal; the tables are partly of gold, partly of amethyst; the columns supporting the tables are partly of ivory, partly of amethyst. The court in which we watch the jousting is floored with onyx in order to increase the courage of the combatants. In the palace at night, nothing is burned for light, but wicks supplied with balsam ...
Before our palace stands a mirror, the ascent to which consists of five and twenty steps of porpyry and serpintine ... This mirror is guarded day and night by three thousand men. We look therein and behold all that is taking place in every province and region subject to our sceptre.
Seven kings wait upon us monthly, in turn, with sixty-two dukes, two hundred and fifty-six counts and marquises. Twelve archbishops sit at table with us on our right and twenty bishops on the left, besides the patriarch of St. Thomas, the Sarmatian Protopope, and the Archpope of Susa ...
Our high lord stewart is a primate and king, our cup-bearer is an archbishop and king, our chamberlain a bishop and king, and our marshal a king and abbot.
The Letter of Prester John. 1155. From About.com. http://altreligion.about.com/library/texts/bl_presterjohn.htm. Accessed April 29, 2007.
…Should you desire to learn the greatness and excellency of our Exaltedness and of the land subject to our sceptre, then hear and believe: I, Presbyter Johannes, the Lord of Lords, surpass all under heaven in virtue, in riches, and in power; seventy-two kings pay us tribute ... In the three Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India, where rests the body of the holy apostle Thomas [Judas the Twin]; it reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends toward deserted Babylon near the Tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king, but all are tributary to us.
Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men -- men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals.
We have some people subject to us who feed on the flesh of men and of prematurely born animals, and who never fear death. When any of these people die, their friends and relations eat him ravenously, for they regard it as a main duty to munch human flesh. Their names are Gog, Magog, Anie, Agit, Azenach, Fommeperi, Befari, Conei-Samante, Agrimandri, Vintefolei, Casbei, and Alanei. Theses and similar nations were shut in behind lofty mountains by Alexander the Great, towards the north. We lead them at our pleasure against our foes, and neither man nor beast is left undevoured, if our Majesty gives the requisite permission. And when all our foes are eaten, then we return with our hosts home again.
These accursed fifteen [twelve?] nations will burst forth from the four quarters of the earth at the end of the world, in the times of the Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the saints as well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give to our son who will be born, alon with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls, Britain, and Scotland. We shall also give him Spain and all of the land as far as the icy sea.
The nations to which I have alluded, according to the words of the prophet, shall not stand in the judgement on account of their offensive practices, but will be consumed to ashes by a fire which will fall on them from heaven.
Our land streams with honey and is overflowing with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herd, nor does a querulous frog ever quack in it; no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide amongst the grass, not can any poisonous animals exist in it or injure anyone.
Among the heathen flows, through a certain province, the River Indus. Encircling Paradise, it spreads its arms in manifold windings through the entire province. Here are found the emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrsolites, onyxes, beryls, sardius, and other costly stones. Here grows the plant Assidos which, when worn by anyone, protects him from the evil spirit, forcing it to state its business and name -- consequently the foul spirits keep out of the way there. In a certain land subject to us all kinds of pepper is gathered and is exchanged for corn and bread, leather and cloth ...
At the foot of Mount Olympus bubbles up a spring which changes its flavor hour by hour, night and day, and the spring is scarcely three days' journey from Paradise, out of which Adam was driven. If anyone has tasted thrice of the fountain, from that day he will feel no fatigue, but will, as long as he lives, be as a man of thirty years. Here are found the small stones called Nudiosi which, if borne about the body, prevent the sight from waxing feeble and restore it where it is lost. The more the stone is looked at, the keener becomes the sight.
In our territory is a certain waterless sea consisting of tumbling billows of sand never at rest. None have crossed this sea -- it lacks water all together, yet fish of various kinds are cast up upon the beach, very tasty, and the like are nowhere else to be seen.
Three days' journey from this sea are mountains from which rolls down a stony, waterless river which opens into the sandy sea. As soon as the stream reaches the sea, its stones vanish in it and are never seen again. As long as the river is in motion, it cannout be crossed; only four days a week is it possible to traverse it.
Between the sandy sea and the said mountians, in a certain plain, is a fountain of singular virtue which purges Christians and would-be Christians from all transgressions. The water stands four inches high in a hollow stone shaped like a mussel-shell. Two saintly old men watch by it and ask the comers whether they are Christians or are about to become Christians, then whether they desire healing with all their hearts. If they have answered well, they are bidden to lay aside their clothes and to step into the mussel. If what they said be true, then the water begins to rise and gush over their heads. Thrice does the water thus lift itself, and everyone who has entered the mussel leaves it cured of every complaint.
Near the wilderness trickles between barren mountians a subterranean rill which can only by chance be reached, for only occassionally the earth gapes, and he who would descend must do it with precipitation, ere the earth closes again. All that is gathered under the ground there is gem and precious stone. The brook pours into another river and the inhabitants of the neighborhood obtain thence abundance of precious stones. Yet they never venture to sell them without having first offered them to us for our private use. Should we decline them, they are at liberty to dispose of them to strangers. Boys there are trained to remain three of four days under the water, diving after the stones.
Beyond the stone river are the ten tribes of Israel which, though subject to their own kings, are, for all that, tributary to our Majesty.
In one of our lands, hight Zone, are worms called salamanders. These worms can only live in fire, and they build cocoons like silk-worms which are unwound by the ladies of our palace and spun into cloth and dresses which are worn by our Exaltedness. These dresses, in order to be cleaned and washed, are cast into flames ...
When we go to war, we have fourteen golden and bejewelled crosses borne before us instead of banners. Each of these crosses is followed by ten thousand horsemen and one hundred thousand foot soldiers, fully armed, without reckoning those in charge of the luggage and provision.
When we ride abroad plainly we have a wooden, unadorned cross without gold or gems about it, borne before us in order that we meditate on the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ; also a golden bowl filled with earth to remind us of that whence we sprung and that to which we must return; but besides these there is borne a sliver bowl full of gold as a token to all that we are the Lord of Lords.
All riches, such as are upon the world, our Magnificence possesses in superabundance. With us, no one lies, for he who speaks a lie is thenceforth regarded as dead -- he is no more thought of or honored by us. No vice is tolerated by us. Every year we undertake a pilgrimage, with retinue of war, to the body of the holy prophet Daniel which is near the desolated site of Babylon. In out realm fishes are caught, the blood of which dyes purple. The Amazons and the Brahmins are subject to us.
The palace in which our Superemincency resides is built after the pattern of the castle built by the apostle Thomas [Judas the Twin] for the Indian king Gundoforus. Celings joists, and architrave are of Sethym wood, the roof ebony, which can never catch fire. Over the gable of the palace are, at the extremities, two golden apples, in each of which are two carbuncles, so that the gold may shine by day and the carbuncles by night. The greater gates of the palace are of sardius with the horn of the horned snake inwrought so that no one can bring poison within. The other portals are of ebony; the windows are of crystal; the tables are partly of gold, partly of amethyst; the columns supporting the tables are partly of ivory, partly of amethyst. The court in which we watch the jousting is floored with onyx in order to increase the courage of the combatants. In the palace at night, nothing is burned for light, but wicks supplied with balsam ...
Before our palace stands a mirror, the ascent to which consists of five and twenty steps of porpyry and serpintine ... This mirror is guarded day and night by three thousand men. We look therein and behold all that is taking place in every province and region subject to our sceptre.
Seven kings wait upon us monthly, in turn, with sixty-two dukes, two hundred and fifty-six counts and marquises. Twelve archbishops sit at table with us on our right and twenty bishops on the left, besides the patriarch of St. Thomas, the Sarmatian Protopope, and the Archpope of Susa ...
Our high lord stewart is a primate and king, our cup-bearer is an archbishop and king, our chamberlain a bishop and king, and our marshal a king and abbot.
The Letter of Prester John. 1155. From About.com. http://altreligion.about.com/library/texts/bl_presterjohn.htm. Accessed April 29, 2007.
Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter VI, The Pig and the Pepper
CHAPTER VI
Pig and Pepper
For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood--(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)--and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
Fish and Frog servants
The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, `From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.'
Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.
Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
`There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, `and that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.' And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within--a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
`Please, then,' said Alice, `how am I to get in?'
`There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went on without attending to her, `if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.' He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. `But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; `his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.--How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud.
`I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, `till tomorrow--'
At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.
`--or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened.
`How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
`Are you to get in at all?' said the Footman. `That's the first question, you know.'
It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. `It's really dreadful,' she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!'
The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. `I shall sit here,' he said, `on and off, for days and days.'
`But what am I to do?' said Alice.
`Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling.
`Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately: `he's perfectly idiotic!' And she opened the door and went in.
The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.
`There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
Cook, Duchess, Cheshire Cat, Baby, and Alice
`Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, `why your cat grins like that?'
`It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, `and that's why. Pig!'
She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:--
`I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats could grin.'
`They all can,' said the Duchess; `and most of 'em do.'
`I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.
`You don't know much,' said the Duchess; `and that's a fact.'
Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby --the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.
`Oh, please mind what you're doing!' cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. `Oh, there goes his precious nose'; as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
`If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, `the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'
`Which would not be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. `Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis--'
`Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, `chop off her head!'
Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: `Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I--'
`Oh, don't bother me,' said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!' And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: `Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases.' CHORUS.
(In which the cook and the baby joined):-- `Wow! wow! wow!'
While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:-- `I speak severely to my boy, I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases!' CHORUS. `Wow! wow! wow!'
`Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!' the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,' and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, `just like a star-fish,' thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. `If I don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, `they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?' She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). `Don't grunt,' said Alice; `that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.'
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. `But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
No, there were no tears. `If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,' said Alice, seriously, `I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!' The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.
Alice and pig baby
Alice was just beginning to think to herself, `Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?' when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. `If it had grown up,' she said to herself, `it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.' And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, `if one only knew the right way to change them--' when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
Alice speaks to Cheshire Cat
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
`--so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?'
`In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'
`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on `And how do you know that you're mad?'
`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
`I suppose so,' said Alice.
`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.
`Call it what you like,' said the Cat. `Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?'
`I should like it very much,' said Alice, `but I haven't been invited yet.'
`You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished.
Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.
`By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. `I'd nearly forgotten to ask.'
`It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.
`I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again.
Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. `I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; `the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad--at least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.
`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat.
`I said pig,' replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.'
`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
Cheshire Cat fading to smile
`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'
She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself `Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!'
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. (Originally Published as “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”). 1865. The Millenium Fulcrum Edition 3.0. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-table.html. Accessed April 29, 2007.
Pig and Pepper
For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood--(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)--and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
Fish and Frog servants
The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, `From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.'
Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.
Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
`There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, `and that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.' And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within--a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
`Please, then,' said Alice, `how am I to get in?'
`There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went on without attending to her, `if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.' He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. `But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; `his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.--How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud.
`I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, `till tomorrow--'
At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.
`--or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened.
`How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
`Are you to get in at all?' said the Footman. `That's the first question, you know.'
It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. `It's really dreadful,' she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!'
The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. `I shall sit here,' he said, `on and off, for days and days.'
`But what am I to do?' said Alice.
`Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling.
`Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately: `he's perfectly idiotic!' And she opened the door and went in.
The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.
`There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
Cook, Duchess, Cheshire Cat, Baby, and Alice
`Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, `why your cat grins like that?'
`It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, `and that's why. Pig!'
She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:--
`I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats could grin.'
`They all can,' said the Duchess; `and most of 'em do.'
`I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.
`You don't know much,' said the Duchess; `and that's a fact.'
Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby --the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.
`Oh, please mind what you're doing!' cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. `Oh, there goes his precious nose'; as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
`If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, `the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'
`Which would not be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. `Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis--'
`Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, `chop off her head!'
Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: `Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I--'
`Oh, don't bother me,' said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!' And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: `Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases.' CHORUS.
(In which the cook and the baby joined):-- `Wow! wow! wow!'
While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:-- `I speak severely to my boy, I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases!' CHORUS. `Wow! wow! wow!'
`Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!' the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,' and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, `just like a star-fish,' thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. `If I don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, `they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?' She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). `Don't grunt,' said Alice; `that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.'
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. `But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
No, there were no tears. `If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,' said Alice, seriously, `I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!' The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.
Alice and pig baby
Alice was just beginning to think to herself, `Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?' when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. `If it had grown up,' she said to herself, `it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.' And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, `if one only knew the right way to change them--' when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
Alice speaks to Cheshire Cat
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
`--so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?'
`In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'
`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on `And how do you know that you're mad?'
`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
`I suppose so,' said Alice.
`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.
`Call it what you like,' said the Cat. `Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?'
`I should like it very much,' said Alice, `but I haven't been invited yet.'
`You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished.
Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.
`By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. `I'd nearly forgotten to ask.'
`It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.
`I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again.
Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. `I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; `the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad--at least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.
`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat.
`I said pig,' replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.'
`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
Cheshire Cat fading to smile
`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'
She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself `Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!'
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. (Originally Published as “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”). 1865. The Millenium Fulcrum Edition 3.0. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-table.html. Accessed April 29, 2007.
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