Bewilderment
Loss of one's bearings—the world as legible recedes faster than one can re-orient.
1375 passages · 2 Vela essays · in 1 cluster
Study and magazine
Passages
Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.
Page 5 of 69 · 20 per page
1375 tagged passages
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
faster and more accurately? At another point there was a brief fascination with the abacus among the school administrators. A Chinese woman who’d been brought in as a guest to demonstrate how to use one stood with her beaded contraption opposite another adult with a calculator. A problem of long addition was written on the board and a timer set for a competition between the two. The young woman’s slim fingers flew over the beads, moving them up and down the wooden rods attached to the wooden frame. She called out her answer before the timer buzzed and while the other contender was still entering numbers into his calculator. Moments later he called out the same answer. We students gave them a round of obligatory applause. The Chinese woman grinned, gripping the abacus to her chest. Though I was amazed that she could compute so quickly with just some beads, I was even more fascinated with her figure. She was so thin that she looked like she had been modeled from a Gumby cutout. From every dimension she appeared alarmingly flat and her eyes stretched into such extreme slits that I wondered whether she could see at all. Although Synanon had been ahead of its time in integrating blacks and whites, there were few, if any, Asian people in the commune. I had come to acquaint Japanese and Chinese people with martial arts films and B-rated Godzilla movies. The latter had dialogue dubbed into English and also featured other giant dinosaur-like creatures from the Triassic period that suddenly came to life, with their only apparent desire being to trample people and rip up high-rises while shrieking their fury. The young woman with the abacus had a heavy accent, her words seemed swallowed back into her throat, consonants evaporating every so often, vowels blunt. Certain simple words were missing altogether. Although I had just watched her solve long division on an abacus so quickly she’d beaten someone with a calculator, I concluded she must be somewhat slow simply because she couldn’t speak English properly. My lack of contact with the outside world fostered other ignorant assumptions. For instance, I thought that all people in Africa still lived in
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
It is very different from how to read a detective story or a novel. An interesting experience. One night reading a magazine with a blue cover from one of the U.S. universities I found a story by a woman whose name I knew because I had read a science fiction novel and some stories by her. The first paragraph had all sorts of words and colors like science fiction, so I got my mind all ready with this attention. The story didn’t mean anything to me! I didn’t know what it was about. But everything was clear and mysterious, bright and mixed up. Three pages to the end, I realized it was a story about a woman teaching school who gets one of her students to bed with her. I read it again. The story was clear. Only the first paragraph was like science fiction, and it was for the feeling, I think. My attention, you see, turned everything different. I want to write about me so that it happens when you read it like the first way I read that story. I can’t tell all my life. I am too lazy, for one. For two—well, one will do. Its common fabric is charred, in some of the holes of the edge still glows. Or the burning threads cover what is behind. But I want to write about what is at these. There are only half a dozen, and I am twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. There was an earthquake while I was almost a baby. I was in the dark, while everything around me swung and rattled. Somebody broke the door. I saw a man and a woman. The mountain behind them roared and tried to shake the fire out of its hair. Bright rock fell down the crags and made steam. They ran for me and I screamed. One picked me up. The other pulled me away when the first one fell. There is another picture in my mind from that night. On the beach the man is holding me while the woman is down by the water where the people are shouting, trying to get a boat. Then the man takes me down, because the woman calls him. Grey scabs of ash are wrinkling over the water. The waves come in and leave one black line along the sand, roll out, come in and leave another. Now. The first of these memories sits in my mind like a light that I cannot look at much. Like the sun. More like the sun on the water of the sea. The second is only a memory among hundreds of memories I can remember. I can’t give you the differences in the light, what I felt, and the way.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
He grunted as she pulled from him. Following her he felt a door sill under his bare foot, once stubbed his toe on a step. They climbed in heat and dust. Walls: a narrow stair. And still the steps sagged. The small slap of her feet was gone from ahead of him. In the gap, confusion: an unfrosted bulb lights, above her head, came on. She dropped her arm from the string. Shoulders, chin, and stomach shone. Behind her, against the attic wall, beside boxes, old pipes, tools and other attic accouterment, was a painting. A full length portrait of her: It had been put there within the day, the only object without dust. “Now . . .” He rubbed his lip with his thumb knuckle. “Did Proctor . . . ?” “Shhhh . . .” and nodded. She looked from the painting to the window. They could see lights from the houses of Colson Hill. Bull made a long, wordless sound, rubbed blunt fingers along his fat cock. Growled: “Get this pecker up your high-class Colson Hill pussy . . . pussy . . . pussy . . .” a fist around it, moving. Her blood-colored nails touched her thighs, her stomach, the underswell of her breast. “My boot,” she said. “You must dress me as I am in the picture.” He looked around. By the brick chimney that made a column in the room were the piled attire. She moved her foot forward on the floor boards. “My boot.” He bent and picked up the kneeboot. He stood, looked at her, looked at it. He held the metal-boned heel against his matted crotch. He moved his red flesh on the patent glister, walking across the floor. He stopped in front of her. Watched her. She blinked. Her face was: a small scar, not a quarter of an inch, below her mouth. Other than that, her face was. She shook her hair back off her shoulder. Blinked. Breathed in, suddenly, loosing the wrinkle from the skin under her arm. He bent his head. Dropped to his knees. The backs of his thighs on his calves sandwiched hair and sweat. He slipped his fingers beneath her instep, lifted her foot. With his other hand: touched the red nail on her second toe with his forefinger. She cleared her throat. He looked up, only as high as her crotch though. The ligament down from her groin shifted. She cleared her throat again. He looked up at her looking down. The bulb above darkened her face, exploded in the edge of her hair. “Dirty animal . . .” He fell on her foot, nipping, licking, sucking her smaller toes, barking. He curled on the floor, scraping hip and arm, to press the ball of her foot against his groin. She kicked him, twice. In the crotch; and when he gasped, in the face. “My boot . . .”
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
Niger ahead, the captain turned the corner, back to the wharf. As they passed Proctor’s second-floor studio, Niger growled. “What? You think we should let the old fool sleep out his Sunday? Well, I’ve found you. Back to the boat, boy!” Someone was whistling overhead. He looked up. The studio windows were opened and the music came through. It stopped for a few moments of conversation; the voices were Proctor’s and Benny’s. Then a face passing and pausing at the window: “Captain?” “Hey, Proctor!” And Niger barked. “You pull out today, Captain?” “Off in a few minutes.” “Come up for a moment, then.” Face gone and only this voice: “Benny, get the captain some coffee.” Back: “I want to show you something, Captain! Come up!” “I got to go on to the—” Gesturing: “Come on!” And Niger was running up and down the first four steps. “Coffee,” Benny said when the captain reached the top step. The captain took the mug in both hands and lowered his face. His lips heated over the black disk, marred with steam, his own reflection, and smelling of chicory. “Can I give the dog . . . ?” Niger was already leaping at the tin pan of scraps. “Sure.” Then the captain—“Down boy!”—looked again at the wall. Wrapping paper was taped along the molding. On a step ladder, Proctor drew with a lump of chalk. The paper rattled. “What do you think?” Proctor stepped down, left his chalk on the top rung. His fingers were stained terra cotta. “This is just a cartoon for the finished work, of course. But it suggests the composition and some of the immediate detail.” He came across the floor, dusting his fingers on his jeans. “Cartoon? It’s going to move like a movie?” Proctor laughed. “No. I just mean it’s full-sized. It’ll be transferred to a wall, then filled in with color. I’ve been working on it since before sun-up.” The captain frowned at the length of paper. Then smiled. “Ah, you can respond to it. Even at this stage. But you know all my models. Still, the problem remains aesthetic. I’m transported by the idea of using the material in such a way that all the relations remain Unreal.” “You missed the best part.” The captain laughed. “I hear you went on well after I left.” Proctor took a cup from Benny. “I’m only interested in chaos as far as it can be contained in ritual. Even if it’s just the ritual of creation. Beyond that, reality bores me. Art is terribly limiting to certain of the sensibilities, I suppose. Oh, I’d make quite a devil.” Niger worried his bone joints to the boards. “Pleasure, suffering, boredom, death: following the path of least resistance, you are going to have a fair amount of all four. With effort, one can avoid much of the first. With craft, one can make the last three meaningful. But what connection can art make between these inevitables?” He shrugged.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
There was a delicate pressure about his thigh, then tiny, needling pains in his groin. He opened his eyes. His pants were below his knees. Perched on his thigh, the little dragon nuzzled and nipped at the base of his cock. And the waving shadows of the great dragon’s wing fell on him. He snatched his hand to his face to block his eyes. He had no hand. Scales swung above him. Ruby insects worried her flanks. Scales broke away at the wrinkled haunch. The bare flesh reddened toward the dribbling eruption below her tail. He rolled out of the way of a hinder talon that scratched through the coals. The little beast clawed to keep its footing. The great worm twisted her head toward him, blinked one fist-sized eye, waddling, tail beating sparks from the cinders over the floor. He sat up: she squatted, mushing her hole, like a hack in bad fruit, on his face. He thrust out his tongue through blind moments while insects chattered at his ears. But she lumbered on, leaving him reeling, nauseated by fumes of acetone. His face and eyes were filmed with her juice. He tried to wipe it away, and his hand balked, slipped, stuck again against the silt that gummed his lids. The points of light about the burning floor were haloed and gauzed prisms. And the beast, glimmering in opal veils, heaved aside piles of smoke. The black captain waited. In the embers, the rime on his feet glowed. The chain about his left ankle was bright black: a crescent of sweaty skin below one knee, and the underlength of his veined erections (its shadow slanted up his chest) gleamed: so did the bottoms of his lips; and his nostril rims; and the brass at his ear; and the roofs of his eyes. The she-beast nosed the burnings around his feet. The captain reached out with flickering palms (swords of light swung through the gauze on Robby’s eyes) to grasp her ears. Her head came up. Her tongue’s double serpent lazed about his sack and shaft. The captain wrestled her. The tail, thicker at its base than the black thigh, beat about his head. The hand had scuttled to the captain’s foot. Tacky with the same gum that dribbled Robby’s cheek, it clawed to the ankle, clawed higher, hung a moment from the calf, then scurried up the wet thigh, palmed the testicles, and thrust the long cock in as the tail swung away. She swiveled against him, forepaws collapsing in the ashes. The captain stretched along her green back, sank yellow teeth in her scales. Blood scarfed her throat, steamed on the coals, while she hiccupped and hissed. The perspiring sides of the black buttocks hollowed, retreated, hollowed. Slowly she began to crawl forward. The dog hobbled the whining blind woman across the floor. The dragon reared and pranced beneath the Negro, nearing.
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
Isaiah thinks in large vistas of international politics, though always with a focus on Jerusalem. In the long poetic section of chapters 13–23, the prophet provides an inventory of nations that are, one by one, said to be subject to the rule of YHWH. Of particular interest for the book of Isaiah, as we shall see later, is the opening oracle, or prophecy, of this section in chapters 13–14 concerning Babylon. Babylon will become the most powerful nation in the near future and eventually will come to a savage dismantling (14:22–23). But not yet! Before that, the prophet must deal with Israel in the context of the Assyrian empire, the great superpower of the eighth century BCE. In chapters 36–37 we are given narratives and oracles concerning the crisis of Jerusalem when it was under siege by the Assyrian army. Judah’s King Hezekiah is bewildered as he is mocked by the representative of the Assyrian government who taunts him: “How then can you repulse a single captain among the least of my master’s servants, when you rely on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen? Moreover is it without the LORD that I have come up against this land to destroy it? The LORD said to me, ‘Go up against the land and destroy it.’” 36:9–10 In this utterance the Assyrian both ridicules Jerusalem’s dependence on Egypt and names the God of Israel as the one who has sent him against the city. The negotiations of king and empire led to a crisis in which Isaiah, the prophet, is finally summoned. He issues a promise from YHWH that the holy city will be rescued from the Assyrian army: “He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. . . . For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” 37:33, 35 The city can rely on God’s commitment to Israel and to the dynasty of David. This quite remarkable oracle turned out to be right! Jerusalem was indeed saved from the Assyrian imperial army that withdrew and returned home (37:36–38). This unexpected rescue in 701 BCE is a pivot point in the story of Jerusalem and became the taproot of what became Zionism: the conviction that God’s commitment to and love for the city made the city inviolate, or irreproachable. That rescue, it would seem, emboldened the kings who followed David in Jerusalem to act in impervious ways both in military adventure and in oppressive economics. After all, the rescue seemed to suggest that Jerusalem had a blank check from YHWH and could do whatever it wanted with impunity. JERUSALEM FALLS
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
It is very different from how to read a detective story or a novel. An interesting experience. One night reading a magazine with a blue cover from one of the U.S. universities I found a story by a woman whose name I knew because I had read a science fiction novel and some stories by her. The first paragraph had all sorts of words and colors like science fiction, so I got my mind all ready with this attention. The story didn’t mean anything to me! I didn’t know what it was about. But everything was clear and mysterious, bright and mixed up. Three pages to the end, I realized it was a story about a woman teaching school who gets one of her students to bed with her. I read it again. The story was clear. Only the first paragraph was like science fiction, and it was for the feeling, I think. My attention, you see, turned everything different. I want to write about me so that it happens when you read it like the first way I read that story. I can’t tell all my life. I am too lazy, for one. For two—well, one will do. Its common fabric is charred, in some of the holes of the edge still glows. Or the burning threads cover what is behind. But I want to write about what is at these. There are only half a dozen, and I am twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. There was an earthquake while I was almost a baby. I was in the dark, while everything around me swung and rattled. Somebody broke the door. I saw a man and a woman. The mountain behind them roared and tried to shake the fire out of its hair. Bright rock fell down the crags and made steam. They ran for me and I screamed. One picked me up. The other pulled me away when the first one fell. There is another picture in my mind from that night. On the beach the man is holding me while the woman is down by the water where the people are shouting, trying to get a boat. Then the man takes me down, because the woman calls him. Grey scabs of ash are wrinkling over the water. The waves come in and leave one black line along the sand, roll out, come in and leave another. Now. The first of these memories sits in my mind like a light that I cannot look at much. Like the sun. More like the sun on the water of the sea. The second is only a memory among hundreds of memories I can remember. I can’t give you the differences in the light, what I felt, and the way.
But, as it turned out, Kalmbach was registered that day at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington, and it had a coffee shop called the Mayflower Doughnut Coffee Shop (Loftus and Doyle 30). Although we may not always be able to explain the vagaries of memory so neatly as in that case, we must be ready to offer some explanation for the Gospel of Peter ’s somewhat strange and even perverse memory of those passion narratives heard or read in the past. I recall this comment from James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s Social Memory: “Memories have their own specific grammar, and can (must) be analysed as narratives; but they also have functions, and can (must) also be analysed in a functionalist manner, as guides, whether uniform or contradictory, to social identity” (88). What, then, is the logical coherence, narrative grammar, and social function of Peter ’s memory in Brown’s hypothesis? Brown compounds that difficulty when he offers the following “contemporary comparison” in support of his theory about the origins of the passion story in the Gospel of Peter . “Let me suppose that we selected in our own century some Christians who had read or studied Matt in Sunday school or church education classes years ago but in the interim had not been reading their NT. Yet they had heard the canonical passion narratives read in church liturgies. Also they had seen a passion play or dramatization in the cinema, on TV, or on the stage, or heard one on the radio; and they had attended a church service where preachers were using imagination to fill in PN [passion narrative] lacunae and were combining various Gospel passages, e.g., a Good Friday three-hours or Seven-Last-Words service. If we asked this select group of Christians to recount the passion I am certain that they would have an idea of the general outline, but not necessarily be able to preserve the proper sequence of any particular Gospel…. They would remember some catch phrases … one or two of his sayings (‘words’) on the cross … the more vivid Gospel episodes … characters like Pilate, Herod, and the high priest…. There would be a tendency to portray more hostiley the enemies of Jesus…. And amid the remembrances of the passion from the Gospels there would be an admixture of details and episodes not in the Gospels…. In other words, we would get from our test group of Christians modern parallels to GPet ” (1336). In other words, the Gospel of Peter ’s remembrance of things past would be exactly like that of any ordinary group of Christians chosen more or less at random and asked to recall the passion narrative. That assertion cries out for experimental testing. As a minimal but unscientific test, write out your own remembrance of the passion story and see if it reads at all like the Gospel of Peter .
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Similarly, Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic showed the vital intermingling, in late medieval and early modern times, of ancient magical practices with revealed religion. His account of the inextricable intertwining of magical beliefs and practices with Christianity is so persuasive that in the end, after 650 pages, he himself is left to wonder, as are his readers, how people ever managed to extract themselves from this complex entanglement. Yes, Thomas wrote, “magic was ceasing to be intellectually acceptable” in the seventeenth century; and yes, “religion taught them to try self help before invoking supernatural aid.” But we are “forced to the conclusion that men emancipated themselves from these magical beliefs without necessarily having devised any effective technology with which to replace them,” and so, he concluded, “the ultimate origins of this faith in unaided human capacity remain mysterious.”11 Is it not true that the authentic contexts of origins are full of complexities and uncertainties, confusions and dead ends, which Whiggish “clarifications” will necessarily ignore or distort? Thus, in a different sphere, one of the key documents in the origins of Freud’s thought and of the psychoanalytic movement is Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. They were both part of a great stirring of thought, an explosion of creative experimentation and unfettered theorizing about interior states of being and about the human personality, that took off in all directions in the late nineteenth century and that had no certain outcome and many dead ends. An informed contemporary in the 1890s, reading the Freud/Fliess correspondence, might well have criticized both for their strange notions. Both, in the creative ferment of the time, believed they had discovered the sexual roots of emotional disturbances, but they followed different paths. Fliess had one theory, Freud had another. Fliess concluded from his studies that the physiological seat of sexuality lay in the nose, and that there was a twenty-three-day cycle in male sexuality that bore some relation to astronomical movements. Freud believed that he had found something important in infantile sexuality, in tales of childhood seductions, and in the relation of dreams to psychoneurotic symptoms. The medical profession and the public at large paid little more attention to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which proved to be seminal, than it did to Fliess’s monograph on the relationship between the nose and the female sexual organs, which did not. In context, both works were expressions of a wave of fresh, groping experimental thinking which in retrospect one can see liberated Freud’s mind to find its way into a deeper understanding than had been known before. But for an important period in his early career Freud wondered whether Fliess had gotten it right, and he showed the utmost courtesy to the ideas of his imaginative colleague.12
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Others resume the discussion in very specific ways. G. Ugo Nwokeji finds that to understand the structure of the African slave trade one must understand African conceptions of gender, and he demonstrates this in an elaborate discussion of the regionally differentiated roles of women in African economic, social, and military life. “Interregional differences in the gender division of labor” in Africa, he concludes, help explain the variant sex ratios in the slave trade. Specifically he shows how demographic changes in Africa resulted in the decline in the number of female slaves from Biafra.3 David Richardson, analyzing slave revolts, which he meticulously quantifies, considers all manner of shaping circumstances but remains puzzled as to why ships that had more than the normal proportion of slave women were more likely to have rebellions, and searches for an explanation in regional differences between slaves who did and those who did not revolt. He suspects that they largely derive from forces in Africa—the different regional and ethnic cultures and the timing and location of breakdowns in political order. But none of this is certain. Ahead, he writes, lies “a major research agenda” to uncover the complex “inter- and intraregional variations” that underlay the Africans’ rebellions. One thing is definite: only an “African-centered explanation” will suffice.4 A parallel discussion follows from the database’s statistics on transoceanic mortality. “Variations in the internal conditions in Africa,” Herbert Klein and his collaborators write, “had a marked, direct impact on mortality.” The most effective statistical discriminant in mortality rates is the Africans’ ports of departure. Why? The patterns are puzzling. The domestic backgrounds must explain the differences. “More detailed study of patterns of variations” is needed.5 And for both David Geggus and Lorena Walsh, differentiated African cultures are the heart of the matter. The African roots of Haitian culture are no new theme, but in Geggus’s paper it is part of an array of cultural patterns on Saint-Domingue—those of “Congos,” West Central Africans, Igbos, and the Ewe-Fon people. For him, as for the other authors, there is no blur of undifferentiated “Africans.” For all, it seems, the numbers require explanations in terms of highly specified African ethnicities, languages, and behavior patterns—ethnicity alone, in Walsh’s article, being the key to the creation of new African-American identities. The Chesapeake, her figures show, was no “bewildering mix of African peoples … isolated from one another by a ‘Babel of languages.’ ” She knows precisely where the Chesapeake slaves came from, how and why they were distributed among the riverine districts of Virginia and Maryland, and something of the consequences of those patterns of distribution in terms of creolization, family and gender structures, languages, and spiritual life.6
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Such, it seems to me, are some of the problems and consequences that flow from the effort to penetrate beyond manifest events into their contextual settings, into the substructures and surroundings from which they emerge—the unspoken assumptions and latent conditions—and to recover the uncertainties, failures, ambiguities, and bafflements from which what were to become confident successes develop. The problems in this kind of history, in my view the deepest history, are difficult and subtle, and they create great demands on historians: to suspend their present commitments sufficiently to enter different worlds, to broaden their sympathies for people not only distant but alien from themselves, to respond sensitively to apparent anomalies that lead into unsuspected complexities, to distinguish consequences from intentions, and yet to do all that while retaining both the capacity for moral judgments that do not warp the narrative and the conviction that change, growth, decline—evanescence—is what history is all about. I do not think history has collapsed into sociology or anthropology or some kind of ethnosocial science. We will always need to know, in some sequential—that is to say, narrative—form, what has happened in the past, what the struggles were all about, where we have come from; and we will always need to extend the poor reach of our own immediate experience into other lives, accurately portrayed, that have gone before. But we will do so in more complicated and sophisticated ways than we have in the past. History in the richest sense must be, I believe, what Butterfield said it should be, both a study and a story—that is, structural studies woven into narratives that explain the long-term process of change and the short-term accidents, decisions, and encounters which together changed the world from what it had been. But we must all still be storytellers, narrators—though of events lodged deep in their natural contexts. 3 Three Trends in Modern History
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
But amid all these triumphant celebrities of our national origins, there was one antihero who was the greatest loser in the Revolution: the last royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. To Adams and the entire New England political intelligentsia he was not only, as the region’s leading crown officer, a natural political opponent but also the most villainous, traitorous person in the land. He had betrayed his country to the autocrats of Britain; he personified, they believed, all the corruption and the incipient tyranny that they were fighting against. Yet as the monumental biographies of the Founders were being written and the scholarly editions of their papers were being prepared, it was Hutchinson’s biography I chose to write, and I did so for two reasons that were compelling to me. First, I found the bitter, vicious vilification of Hutchinson by the Founders to be mysterious, unaccountable. It baffled me, and I wanted to explain it. For no one loved his native land more than Hutchinson. His small property in Milton, Massachusetts, was, he said over and over, to him the most precious spot on earth. No one had deeper roots in the land than this fifth-generation New Englander, whose great-great-grandmother Anne had been one of the major figures in the first years of the Puritans’ settlement—long before the Adams, Otis, and Hancock families had been heard of—and whose merchant forebears had been among the originators of the region’s Atlantic commerce. He was remarkably accomplished. No American, North or South, wrote better history than he, nor had a more sophisticated, historicist sense of what the study of the past is all about. When in his exile in England Hutchinson was told by the famous Scottish historian William Robertson that he had refused to write the history of the English colonies because “there was no knowing what would be the future condition of them,” Hutchinson replied that “be it what it may, it need make no odds in writing the history of what is past, and I thought a true state of them ought to be handed down to posterity.”1
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
At the simplest level, the difficulties of reaching back and locating events in their context are obvious. We cannot divest ourselves of our own assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences—strip away everything that intervened between then and now—in order to appreciate fully, identify with that other, distant way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We cannot experience what they experienced in the way they experienced it. We cannot contract our expanded sense of possibilities into their more limited sphere, nor project our skepticism into their sense of wonder and belief. And we can have little notion of what were commonplaces to them, underlying but shaping circumstances so ordinary and unremarkable as to have been subliminal—everyday discomforts (of clothing that itched, of shoes that tore the feet, of lice, fleas, and vermin); the ubiquity of filth in public places; the constant sound of urban bells in medieval Europe; the automatic, unthinking management of personal hygiene; the constant expectation of incomprehensible illnesses and sudden death; the sense of the reality, urgency, and plenitude of animist forces; the absence or scarcity of print; the slow pace of communication and travel; the assumption of utterly unbridgeable social distances, distances so great as to stimulate awe, not envy. All of those ordinary circumstances of life are almost completely unrecoverable precisely because they were so ordinary, so unremarkable hence unremarked. And beyond that there is another obvious difficulty in recovering the contexts of the past. The fact—the inescapable fact—is that we know how it all came out, and they did not. No more by them then than by us now could the future be imagined. The natural orientation of their experience was to their past. Our perspective, in studying their lives, is formed by what proved to be their future, which is our past, the ignorance of which was the most profound circumstance of their lives. We will never fully recapture their uncertainty and re-create it in the fabric of the history we write. The inner logic of what we do leads us in the opposite direction. Knowing the outcome, we feel it to be our obligation to show the process by which the known eventuality came about. So we try to describe the path from then to now, and in doing so select for our accounts the elements in a once indeterminate situation that appear to have led to the future outcome. Our histories will therefore attempt to make clear, if not the inevitability of what happened, at least the logic of why it happened as it did, and so it seems that we have no reason to dwell on initial uncertainties, or to attempt to recover the original ambiguities and make them real.
Mark’s account is best seen as his own creation, allowing him to emphasize certain parallels between the fate of John and Jesus, especially how both were put to death at the insistence of others by a reluctant and almost guiltless civil authority—Antipas for one, Pilate for the other. In life, death, and even burial by disciples, John is, for Mark, the precursor of Jesus. And, probably, he was deliberately recalling an earlier and well-known Mediterranean horror story. When, in 184 B.C.E ., Cato was one of the two official censors at Rome, he had Lucius Quinctius Flaminius expelled from the senate despite his consular rank. His crime is described by the orator Cicero, who died in 43 B.C.E .; again by the historian Livy, who died in 17 C.E .; and finally by the rhetorician Seneca the Elder, who died in 40 C.E . Here is one of the two versions in Livy’s history of Rome, Book 39.43:3–4. At Placentia a notorious woman, with whom Flaminius was desperately in love, had been invited to dinner. There he was boasting to the courtesan, among other things, about his severity in the prosecution of cases and how many persons he had in chains, under sentence, whom he intended to behead. Then the woman, reclining below him, said that she had never seen a person beheaded and was very anxious to behold the sight. Hereupon, he says, the generous lover, ordering one of the wretches to be brought to him, cut off his head with his sword. This deed…was savage and cruel: in the midst of drinking and feasting, where it was the custom to pour libations to the gods and to pray for blessings, as a spectacle for a shameless harlot, reclining in the bosom of a consul, a human victim sacrificed and bespattering the table with his blood! The point was not that the man was innocent; he was going to be executed in any case. But it should still not be done just to please a mistress, and not at a banquet. The story was clearly a well-known example of how not to exercise power. Mark’s creation intends, most likely, to recall that classic model. Even if one took John’s criticism of Antipas’s marital rearrangements as fact, it would hardly be warrant for execution. Some more serious threat must have motivated Antipas’s action. One could, indeed, almost guess what that threat must have been, since Josephus gets most oblique, devious, and defensive whenever Jewish messianism or apocalypticism is in question. It would hardly do, after all, to show too clearly that what Josephus had applied to the Roman emperor Vespasian could also be applied by others to anti-Roman Jewish patriots, especially to ones of a class far, far beneath the imperial purple. And it is precisely as an apocalyptic prophet that John appears in the New Testament gospels, although there too one sees a tendency to smother politics in piety and rebellion in religion.
The people in the town had guards watching the tomb, because Jesus proclaimed that he would rise from the dead. Sure enough he did rise from the dead and the whole town was shaken up. Not many believed he was the Son of God, until now. Neither in that summary nor in any other one did anybody come up with anything even remotely resembling the passion version of the Gospel of Peter . Nobody said anything about a crucifixion under Herod Antipas rather than Pontius Pilate or about one conducted by Jewish people rather than Roman soldiers. And nobody said anything about a resurrection taking place clearly and visibly before Jewish authorities and Roman soldiers. I would, in fact, challenge Brown to produce any such contemporary remembrances of the passion as he proposed to explain the strange memories in the Gospel of Peter . And that brings me back to my core objection: What theory of memory or remembrance undergirds those claims by Brown? Put another way, how should they be tested? The answer is very obvious, but it involves combining social-scientific criticism with older methods such as historical and literary criticism in studying biblical texts. That is the only way to discipline claims about the intersection of memory, orality, and literacy based on assumed common sense, personal intuition, or hypothesis unaccompanied by either theoretical foundation or experimental confirmation. What, in other words, do we learn about the intersection of memory, orality, and literacy from oral fieldworkers operating inductively, or from social psychologists operating experimentally? It is time to confront the mystique of the oral Jesus tradition with some hard and inductive data from checked experience and controlled experiment. CHAPTER 4DOES MEMORY REMEMBER?Experiments have shown that simply repeating a false statement over and over leads people to believe that it is true. Likewise, when we repeatedly think or talk about a past experience, we tend to become increasingly confident that we are recalling it accurately. Sometimes we are accurate when we recount frequently discussed experiences. But we are also likely to feel more confident about frequently rehearsed experiences that we remember inaccurately. Retrieving an experience repeatedly can make us feel certain that we are correct when we are plainly wrong. The tenuous correlation between a person’s accuracy and confidence is especially relevant to eyewitness testimony. Witnesses who rehearse their testimony again and again in interviews with police officers and attorneys may become extremely confident about what they say—even when they are incorrect. This consequence of rehearsal is especially important because numerous studies have shown that juries are powerfully influenced by confident eyewitnesse. Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory , p. III Almost everything that common sense tells us about memory is wrong. And recently in North America ruined reputations, shattered lives, and destroyed families have been the price of that common sense.
Then how will you understand all the parables?” (4:11–13) Those are surely some of the most stunning words ever uttered by Jesus. You could take them in two ways—one malign, one benign, but both bad. It is possible to give that declaration a somewhat benign reading by saying that the effect of Jesus’s riddle parables is cited as their purpose. The incomprehension of the audience is recorded as if were the intention of Jesus. You find that same structure, for example, in the book of Exodus, as Moses attempts to liberate the enslaved Hebrews from Egyptian bondage and Pharaoh keeps refusing. Watch how the causality shifts from what Pharaoh did to God and becomes what God did to Pharaoh: Pharaoh hardened his heart. (8:15, 32; 9:34) Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. (7:13–14, 22; 8:19; 9:7, 35) God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. (9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:8) What Pharaoh did to God as effect, result, and consequence becomes attributed to God as cause, intention, and purpose. Mark, however, does not seem to want any such benign reading. He is not saying that the unintended result of Jesus’s parables was incomprehension. He is saying that incomprehension was already there in response to Jesus’s message and Jesus therefore used riddle parables to increase and punish that incomprehension. According to Mark, prior rejection of Jesus by his listeners begets counterrejection by Jesus of those listeners—through riddle parables. Mark’s interpretation, therefore, is that Jesus’s parables were deliberately intended to be incomprehensible to outsiders, the opponents, but comprehensible—with special interpretation from Jesus—to insiders, the disciples. THAT BRINGS US TO the third question for this chapter. Why did Mark interpret Jesus’s parables as punitive riddle parables for his opponents that required private interpretation for his followers? My answer derives from specific passages in Mark—in Chapters 3 and 4 as well as in Chapters 7 and 12. I begin with Mark 3. Here is Mark’s vision of the gospel: “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’” (1:14–15). But from 2:1 onward, Jesus meets with repeated opposition, which reaches a climax when “the Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (3:6). Next comes this incident: “His family…went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons’” (3:21–22). It is in immediate response to that absolute insult that Mark first mentions Jesus’s use of parables: He called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
But you cannot ignore the healings and the exorcisms, especially in their socially subversive function. You cannot ignore the pointedly political overtones of the very term Kingdom of God itself. It is, unfortunately, one of the abiding temptations of pastors and scholars to reduce Jesus to words alone, to replace a lived life with a preached sermon or an interesting idea. To remove, however, that which is radically subversive, socially revolutionary, and politically dangerous from Jesus’ actions is to leave his life meaningless and his death inexplicable. Back from the Dead If some of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms can and should be understood against the basic background in cross-cultural anthropology ranging from the interaction of body and society (Mary Douglas) to the interface of medicine and psychiatry (Erika Bourguignon), what of others such as the raising of the dead and the stilling of the storm? I leave aside for now all those actions usually called nature miracles, where Jesus is involved with objects rather than persons; I will consider them in detail in this book’s final chapter. But what, for example, about Lazarus? As a cover illustration for my book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant , I chose an early and very popular Christian carving of the raising of Lazarus. I chose it because, while I do not think this event ever did or could happen, I think it is absolutely true. Let me explain. We are back to, in fact we have never left, the individual’s politic body as the microcosm of society’s body politic. Let me call the microcosm or body side of that interaction an event , an actual and historical healing of an afflicted individual at a moment in time. And let me call the macrocosmic or society side of that interaction a process , some wider socioreligious phenomenon that is symbolized by such an individual happening. But just as event can give rise to process, so process can give rise to event. The case of the Galilean leper shows us how an action performed on one single body reaches out to become an action performed on society at large. And it would happen with or without Jesus’ intention, since body/society symbolism is a permanent given. As all the theological apologetics exercised on that story emphasize, Jesus is making claims about who regulates social boundaries, who determines cultural norms, who defines religious authority, and who decides political power. In that case, event becomes process . But the case of the Gerasene demoniac indicates the opposite phenomenon. I do not think there ever was an event such as that. It is, of course, possible that there was such a happening, but the event is just too perfect an embodiment of every Jewish revolutionary’s dream. In that case, most likely, process becomes event .
It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Once again, a word about Mediterranean mustard plants and nesting birds helps us to understand the startling nature of that conjunction. The Roman author Pliny the Elder, who was born in 23 C.E . and died when scientific curiosity brought him too close to an erupting Vesuvius in 79 C.E . wrote about the mustard plant in his encyclopedic Natural History 19.170–171: Mustard…with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once. There is, in other words, a distinction between the wild mustard and its domesticated counterpart, but even when one deliberately cultivates the latter for its medicinal or culinary properties, there is an ever-present danger that it will destroy the garden. The mustard plant is dangerous even when domesticated in the garden, and is deadly when growing wild in the grain fields. And those nesting birds, which may strike us as charming, represented to ancient farmers a permanent danger to the seed and the grain. The point, in other words, is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three, four, or even more feet in height. It is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas, where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like. Like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties. Something you would want only in small and carefully controlled doses—if you could control it. It is a startling metaphor, but it would be interpreted quite differently by those, on the one hand, concerned about their fields, their crops, and their harvests, and by those, on the other, for whom fields, crops, and harvest were always the property of others. Open Commensality Let that title stand unexplained for a moment. Its meaning and necessity will soon become clear. At the end of the preceding chapter, a comparison was made between John and Jesus in terms of fasting and feasting.
“I’ve had you on my mind,” says God, “a thousand years.” That deepest level challenges us to think about the character of God because, from the very start, we know the full truth, but God never admits it to Job. God gives Job back double for all he had lost (42:10), everything twofold, but still not the truth. THIS CHAPTER LOOKED AT three challenge parables from the Old Testament tradition and each is—in its final form—a protest against the inevitable absolutes of the Persian restoration. It was a dangerous period for Israel’s tribal loyalty, ethnic identity, and covenantal fidelity, not because the Persians persecuted it lethally, but because Persia supported it imperially. It was a very dangerous moment for Israel’s future when God, through the prophet Isaiah, called Cyrus “my Messiah” (45:1). The book-length parables of Ruth, Jonah, and Job challenged ever more deeply the security of Israel’s Persian-era absolutes and exclusivities. They were challenges to the Bible, from the Bible, by the Bible, in the Bible. Those parables escalated their protest from Ruth through Jonah to Job. I placed them in that order to emphasize the external threefold escalation through them. But Job itself contains an internal threefold escalation—a question posed critically to Israel’s ethnicity, the Torah’s sanctions, and God’s veracity. It is surely very strange, is it not, how Israel’s ancient tribal and imperial enemies—Moabites, Ninevites, and Edomites—become ideals in these serenely fictional stories? After a good Moabite, good Ninevites, and a good Edomite, we should have been ready for—and should not have been surprised by—a good Samaritan from Jesus. We should have immediately acknowledged that challenge parable from Jesus and recognized how Luke had changed it into an example parable. In any case, it is clear that challenge parables, therefore, existed before the time of Jesus and probably influenced his own parables as well. In other words, that reading of the Good Samaritan as challenge parable in Chapter 3 has been rendered almost traditional—even if countertraditional—by those case studies in Chapter 4. What, then, comes next in Chapter 5? The next question is probably clear by now. Is that Good Samaritan an exceptional challenge parable among the stories of Jesus? Is it, maybe, the only one? In the next chapter, therefore, I return to consider some more of Jesus’s best-known parables. Furthermore, as we see other challenge parables in that chapter, we will have to imagine their original oral context as distinct from their present written condition. How do we imagine Jesus’s challenges as actually working in practice? All of that still leaves a climactic Chapter 6. The major questions there will be twofold. First, why did Jesus choose challenge parables as his special and distinctive style with which to proclaim the kingdom of God?
Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest?… This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianized and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus , p. 402 The words I italicized in that epigraph are basic to my argument. In the first paragraph Schweitzer sets up a dichotomy between Jesus’ eschatological message and those moderns who refuse to accept it as such. But the next paragraph switches the dichotomy to one between the world-negating message of Jesus and the world-affirming interpretation of modern researchers. Schweitzer reiterates that disjunction a few times within that same paragraph. On the one hand, there is the “world-accepting ethic … world-affirming spirit … general affirmation of the world” from moderns. On the other, there is the “world-negating spirit … world-negation … personal rejection of the world” from Jesus. For Schweitzer, then, eschatology and world-negation are synonyms. Schweitzer, however, also interjects the term apocalyptic into this debate. On the one hand, he uses eschatology and apocalyptic to mean the same thing, referring on subsequent pages to, first, “the eschatology of the time of Jesus” (1969:368) and, then, “the apocalyptic movement at the time of Jesus” (1969:370). On the other hand, in between, he distinguishes between “two eschatologies”—one prophetic, with Elijah as hero, and one apocalyptic, with Daniel as hero. He distinguishes them by claiming that apocalyptic eschatology is created by “external events,” while prophetic eschatology is created by “great personalities” (1969:369–370), a distinction whose romanticism would probably not hold up well to close scrutiny. But, leaving that explanation aside, we now have (1) eschatology used as a genus with at least two species (apocalyptic and prophetic) and (2) eschatology used as a synonym for one of those species. That, I think, is the root of our definitional problem. You cannot have it both ways; you cannot, under any definitions, have apocalyptic equal to apocalyptic eschatology equal to eschatology . When you attempt to do so, you privilege one species as equal to its genus. Schweitzer reconstructed a Jesus who was quite wrong about the imminent end of the world and was quite mistaken in his attempt to force the hand of God by going deliberately toward martyrdom in Jerusalem. This is his justly famous description of that delusion: “There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close.