Despair
The collapse of hope; futurelessness as a felt fact, not a thought.
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From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
I just can’t. He’ll find out somehow. Flying past me are objects I might swerve into instead—telephone pole, tree, a ramp I could sail off the edge of into oblivion. I unclick my seat belt and try to imagine my face shattering the glass into exploding stars. But I’m a coward, and I also suspect it’s just my luck that I’ll only crush my body to live on wired up to a breathing machine. Finally, I pull off the road into a gas station, where I bend my head to the steering wheel, sobbing, and suddenly flying through me comes a new image of Dev charging around my study with his red cape behind him. He’s coming for me, I think, like a superhero. He’s flying me out of myself. A teenage girl taps the far side of my windshield to ask, Are you okay, lady? And I nod and wipe my eyes. I reattach the seat belt and edge up to the road with my blinker on to turn around. Heading to the halfway house, I drive for the first time in my life under the speed limit, obeying every arcane law, slowing to let grandmothers cut in front of me. It’s a relief to place myself before the staff person on duty, asking him to call my doctor, because I’m fixing to off myself.
And those who had seen it told what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their neighborhood. An individual is, of course, being healed, but the symbolism is also hard to miss or ignore. The demon is both one and many; is named Legion, that fact and sign of Roman power; is consigned to swine, that most impure of Judaism’s impure animals; and is cast into the sea, that dream of every Jewish resister. And it may be left open whether the exorcist is asked to depart because a cured demoniac is not worth a herd of swine or because the people see quite clearly the political implications of the action. As I said, I do not think this is an actual scene from Jesus’ life, but it openly characterizes Roman imperialism as demonic possession and shows that, in linking colonial domination with demonic possession, we are not simply retrojecting modern sensibilities back into first-century minds. There is for us a modern equivalent among the Lunda-Luvale tribes of the Barotse in what was then Northern Rhodesia. They always had, according to Barrie Reynolds, traditional ailments called mahamba , which resulted from possession by ancestral spirits.* But they then developed a special modern version called bindele , the Luvale word for “European,” which necessitated a special exorcistic church and a lengthy curative process for its healing. Legion , I think, is to colonial Roman Palestine as bindele was to colonial European Rhodesia, and in both cases colonial exploitation is incarnated individually as demonic possession. In discussing Jesus’ exorcisms, therefore, two factors must be kept in mind. One is the almost split-personality position of a colonial people. If they submit gladly to colonialism, they conspire in their own destruction; if they hate and despise it, they admit that something more powerful than themselves, and therefore to some extent desirable, is hateful and despicable. And what does that do to them? Another is that colonial exorcisms are at once less and more than revolution; they are, in fact, individuated symbolic revolution. Jesus and Beelzebul One final point. Jesus both healed diseases and expelled demons, and quite often illness and possession are considered to be simultaneous states. An example is the following incident from the Q Gospel at Luke 11:14–15, where Satan is named as Beelzebul, the name of an ancient Canaanite god: Now he was casting out a demon that was dumb; when the demon had gone out, the dumb man spoke, and the people marveled. But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons.” My focus here is on that accusation, which, unconnected with any specific cure, is also found in Mark 3:22 and must therefore be taken very seriously. But why did anyone make such an accusation? It might be enough to say that it is just standard name-calling, the type of rhetorical assassination we know so well from political campaigns.
He himself noted that “on many occasions, especially in the Judaic-Christian tradition, though not there alone, the priestly class opposed tyranny and injustice and supported the needs and interests of the weaker elements of society,” and did so from “the tradition embodied in the Western religions that God is above all a God of justice and that His awesome power will be used to punish the unjust” (263). One final point. This is another case where the Lenski-Kautsky model and the Eisenstadt model are in complete agreement, but as usual the latter is much more general than the former. Eisenstadt notes that “in most of the societies studied, the value systems of the major religions were sufficiently differentiated to contain a strong ingredient of universalistic and/or transcendental orientations. They thus constituted potential sources of autonomous orientations, of change, and of dissent…. The latent predilection for change that characterized some of the religious institutions, orders, and groups explained their frequent participation in ‘radical’ social and political movements—e.g., in peasant uprisings, and in urban movements and conspiracies” (190). A transcendent mandate can often justify a political or social situation. But it can also turn it upside down. Clergy and aristocracy, however named, differentiated, or combined, represent divergent sources of power, and that social fault line cannot be eliminated without eradicating either religion or politics. Probably not even then. PART VHistory and ArcheologyGovernments, Theocracies and Armies are, of course, stronger than the scattered peasants. So the peasants have to resign themselves to being dominated, but they cannot feel as their own the glories and undertakings of a civilization that is radically their enemy. The only wars that touch their hearts are those in which they have fought to defend themselves against that civilization, against History and Government, Theocracy and the Army. These wars they fought under their own black pennants, without military leadership or training and without hope, ill-fated wars that they were bound to lose, fierce and desperate wars, incomprehensible to historians…. But the myth of the brigands is close to their hearts and a part of their lives, the only poetry in their existence, their dark, desperate epic. Even the appearance of the peasants today recalls that of the brigands: they are silent, lonely, gloomy and frowning in their black suits and hats and, in winter, black top coats, armed whenever they set out for the fields with gun and axe. They have gentle hearts and patient souls; centuries of resignation weigh on their shoulders, together with a feeling of the vanity of all things and of the overbearing power of fate. But when, after infinite endurance, they are shaken to the depths of their beings and are driven by an instinct of self-defense or justice, their revolt knows no bounds and no measure. It is an unhuman revolt whose point of departure and final end alike are death, in which ferocity is born of despair.
You have said to Aphrodisias, “Do not forget me.” How can I forget you? Therefore I urge you not to worry. 29 [year] of Caesar [Augustus], Payni [month] 23 [day]. Hilarion and some companions had left their home at Oxyrhynchus and traveled north to work in Alexandria. His wife, Alis, pregnant with their second child, having heard nothing nor received anything from him, transmitted her concern through Aphrodisias, who was also traveling to the capital. The letter is Hilarion’s response to her concern, and, tender to his pregnant wife but terrible to his unborn daughter, it shows us with stark clarity what an infant meant in the Mediterranean. It was quite literally a nobody unless its father accepted it as a member of the family rather than exposing it in the gutter or rubbish dump to die of abandonment or to be taken up by another and reared as a slave. To be like an infant child is interpreted by Matthew 18:1–4 as meaning to have appropriate humility, by the Gospel of Thomas 22 as meaning to practice sexual asceticism, and by John 3:1–10 as meaning to have recently received baptism. Those three readings avoid the horrifying meaning of a child as a nothing, a nobody, a nonperson in the Mediterranean world of paternal power, absolute in its acceptance or rejection of the newly born infant. In giving Mark’s version above I italicized the core aphorism, whose basic conjunction of children/Kingdom is all that certainly came from Jesus. Concentrate, for a moment, on the framing situation created by Mark himself. This indicates the situation not from the historical Jesus but from the historical Mark. Notice those framing words: touch, took in his arms, blessed, laid hands on . Those are the official bodily actions of a father designating a newly born infant for life rather than death, for accepting it into his family rather than casting it out with the garbage. And the disciples do not want Jesus to act in this positive and accepting way. There must, therefore, have been a debate within the Markan community on whether it should adopt such abandoned infants, and Mark has Jesus say yes even though other authorities—the disciples themselves—say no. Once again we are forced to face ancient Mediterranean realities, and Mark’s later application helps us to see more clearly what was there from Jesus in the beginning: that a Kingdom of Children is a Kingdom of Nobodies. Who Needs a Mustard Plant? There is another rather startling conjunction, but in a parable rather than in an aphorism or dialogue—the conjunction between the mustard seed and the Kingdom. The parable is, by the way, the only one attributed to Jesus that has triple independent attestation. I give only one version, from Mark 4:30–32: And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?
Taking eschatology as a genus or upper-level term accords, actually, with scholarly practice in using phrases such as realized eschatology, thorough-going eschatology, imminent eschatology, present eschatology, future eschatology , and even (sometimes but not consistently) apocalyptic eschatology . It also helps us see how easily one might mix and match different types of eschatology, how easily one might slip or slide from one to the other, how readily a visionary might propose one type and an audience hear a different one. But to take eschatology openly and explicitly as a genus means that one must define it as such apart from and before any species are mentioned. So here goes. Eschatology is one of the great and fundamental options of the human spirit. It is a profoundly explicit no to the profoundly implicit yes by which we usually accept life’s normalcies, culture’s presuppositions, and civilization’s discontents. It is a basic and unusual world-negation or rejection as opposed to an equally basic but more usual world-affirmation or acceptance. For myself, left to myself, I would prefer to bury the term eschatological and use instead a term such as world-negation . But I presume that eschatological is here to stay, so I continue to use it. In my own usage, the concept and term eschatological has three necessary components. First, it indicates a vision and/or program that is radical, counter-cultural, utopian, or this-world-negating. It presumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way of the world—not something that could easily be fixed, changed, or improved, but something so profoundly and radically wrong that only something profoundly and radically opposite could remedy it. Second, the mandate of that vision and/or program is taken to be divine, transcendental, supernatural; that is, it does not simply derive from natural or human forces or ideas. Eschatology is, as it were, a divinely mandated Utopia, a divine radicality. Third, depending on why one announces that radical and cosmic no and how one intends to live out that no in a fundamentally negated world, there are various types and modes of the eschatological challenge. Those types are species of the genus-level term eschatology , or world-negation. Three such species will become important as I proceed. Let me state again that my intention is not to force others to use these expressions but rather to clarify the concepts I am using and the terms I accept for them. If others disagree with my concepts and/or terms, I ask only that they clarify their own positions as fully as I attempt to do here. It is important, however, that we distinguish the significant concepts involved and not just argue over different words for the same concepts. Against that general background, I look next at the theologies of the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas to specify as precisely and accurately as possible the types of eschatology they contain. That will take up the rest of this chapter.
Finally, in terms of Theissen’s parallels between the kingdom-of-God movement and the Cynic movement, Horsley states that “whereas the Cynics lived without home and possessions as an intentional ‘way of life,’ the delegates of Jesus left home, possessions, and family behind temporarily as an unavoidable but more incidental matter necessitated by their mission” (1989:117, my italics). That, I think, is but half right. There is, as we shall see below, a clear difference between the symbolic attire of the Cynic itinerants and that of the kingdom itinerants. For the former, taking a knapsack and staff indicated personal self-sufficiency. For the latter, not taking a knapsack and staff indicated communal dependency. So far so good. But did all those fierce and terrible sayings about home, family, and possessions mean only temporary departures and transient abandonments? That brings up a much more telling critique and a much better explanation of what was actually at stake. About a decade before Horsley, Wolfgang Stegemann criticized Theissen’s itinerancy proposal on an even more fundamental issue. Did those itinerants leave home, family, and possessions voluntarily at the call of Jesus, or had they lost them all already? Was Jesus demanding dispossession or presuming it? “The concept of ‘ethical norms’ (or ‘ethical radicalism’) assumes that voluntary renunciations are in question here…. The ‘lack of possessions’ means for Theissen a ‘renunciation of possessions’ and not simply the situation of the poor person who has nothing. The abandonment of family … is not the result of some social constraint but an ‘ethical’ consequence of the call to discipleship. For this reason Theissen justly compares the early Christian wandering charismatics to the wandering Cynic philosophers. These two movements, as Theissen sees them, did not make an ethical virtue out of social necessity (beggary), but took real beggary as the model for their own deviant behavior” (155). That presses hard on the basic issue. Was this itinerancy voluntary in origin? Did it begin as some form of freely chosen renunciation? Was it, in other words, asceticism? Stegemann suggests an alternative reading, which is better than Theissen’s voluntary abandonment or Horsley’s temporary abandonment of normal life. “The first followers of Jesus, like their master, were from the poor and hungry, not as the result of any renunciation of possessions but because in fact they possessed nothing” (166). He suggests that modern well-off exegetes may find that difficult to take, because criticism is then “voiced not by ethically motivated heroes of renunciation but by probably very unattractive characters” (166). To be accurate, however, Theissen himself had mentioned (but not emphasized) that same point, not in his original 1974 essay but in a 1977 article: “It has no doubt by now become clear that most socially uprooted people came from the middle classes. It was the people who had declined into poverty, rather than the people born in poverty, who set out to pass their lives beyond the boundaries of normal life, or even to seek for ways of renewing society” (1992:88).
I understand, even at this point in the discussion, why relations between imperial Romans and colonial Jews in and around the Jewish homeland might become both desperate and disastrous. That conjunction of anthropological and historical data explains not only the three great revolts between 66 and 135 C.E . but, preceding them, the frequency of disturbances detailed so well in the work of Richard Horsley (1985). From the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E . until the first revolt, there were constant signs of lower-class resistance to Roman imperial power in the Jewish homeland. Protesters gathered, again and again, to make unarmed pleas before the second-rank Roman prefect of Palestine or the distant but first-rank Roman governor of Syria. Sometimes they were effective in their protests; sometimes they were slaughtered. Prophets gathered large groups of followers and led them out into the desert so that they could cross the Jordan into that land, which God would then give back to them from the Romans as of old from the Canaanites. Since they were expecting divine deliverance and not human violence, these prophets and their followers were usually unarmed. Always they were slaughtered. Bandits increased in number as farmers were forced off their lands through debt or disaster and chose the option of banditry in the hills rather than beggary on the roads. Messiahs arose, invoking the ancient ideal of David and proclaiming war against Rome in the name of God. My next and final step is the superimposition of archeology, and especially Lower Galilean archeology, on those two previous strata. Anthropology has indicated for us the general conditions within which peasant resistance or rebellion may arise, and it has shown, in the specific case of the commercializing Roman empire, that such conditions were present. But were those conditions actually and particularly present in early Roman Galilee? What if everything just cited from peasant anthropology and Jewish tradition were true, but there was neither the slightest evidence of commercialization in Galilee in the first third of the first century nor the slightest changes in Galilean culture in the hundred years from the arrival of Herod the Great to the First Roman-Jewish War? What if all the evidence showed Galilee as a rural backwater which neither the Roman Empire nor the Herodian dynasty had found worthy of exploitation? How does the early Roman culture look to Galilean archeology, especially when that data is superimposed on the cross-cultural anthropology of agrarian empire and peasant society? It is a very good time to ask such questions. In his doctoral dissertation, Jonathan Reed summed up the present situation of Galilean archeology by noting, “During the past decade there has been an explosion of new excavations in and around Galilee. In the past few years the spade has been set to the ancient cities of Tiberias, Bethsaïda, Gaba, and Caesarea Philippi. Other excavations on their initial phase are being conducted at Hippos and Jotapata.
It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.* Notice, however, that he uses the term eschatological where I have consistently used the word apocalyptic . He explains what he means by eschatological a few pages later on: That which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based on an eschatological world-view, and contain the expression of a mind for which the contemporary world with its historical and social circumstances no longer had any existence. They are appropriate, therefore, to any world, for in every world they raise the man who dares to meet their challenge, and does not turn and twist them into nothingness, above his world and his time, making him inwardly free, so that he is fitted to be, in his own world and in his own time, a simple channel of the power of Jesus…. Why spare the spirit of the indiviual 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?* There is a confusion in Schweitzer’s text between a wider or generic and a narrower or specific term. Both terms are absolutely necessary, and so is their careful distinction from one another. The wider term is eschatology or world-negation . It indicates a radical criticism of culture and civilization and thus a fundamental rejection of this world’s values and expectations. It describes those who have turned profoundly away from normal life in disappointment or anger, in sorrow or pain, in contempt or abandonment. They imagine another and more perfect world whose alluring vision trivializes the one all around them. But that wider term must cover all sorts of ideas and programs and all types of ideal or perfect worlds. Examples are mystical, utopian, ascetic, libertarian, or anarchistic eschatologies or world-negations. Those are all narrower or more specific terms. They extend from ascetics who stalk away from the world into caves, deserts, or monasteries, to nihilists who destroy it with words, deeds, or bombs. Another such specific term is apocalyptic eschatology . It presumes a world judged so catastrophically evil and deemed so irrevocably beyond human remedy that only immediate divine intervention can rectify it. It furnishes, therefore, a special revelation about the imminent ending of that evil world, about the liberation and exaltation of us and the conversion, punishment, or annihilation of them , and about a new situation in which we are taken up to heaven or heaven descends to embrace us .
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Those who migrated as indentured servants left very few records in which one can glimpse their inner lives, but the uprooting and migration of the husbandmen and farmworkers from Yorkshire and the clansmen from the Highlands and the Scottish islands are well documented. The diaries, letters, public reports, and newspaper accounts reveal scenes of wrenching departures, terrifying and sometimes fatal experiences at sea, and ultimately the disorientation of resettlement in a strange new world. The lands on which they settled seemed vacant; at best they were thinly peopled with aborigines with whom the settlers would not assimilate. It was a world that lacked for these Europeans the dense social texture that had always enclosed them. Life on an isolated farm on Prince Edward Island or in the Genesee or Shenandoah valleys, or near Augusta, Pensacola, or Natchez was profoundly different from life on a tenancy in County Down or Dorset. There was no human context. Nothing was prescribed, ascribed, given. Removed from the subtly modulated society they had known, the settlers would be bereft and reduced. Independence was enriching, but most often it meant loss, isolation, and cultural deprivation, and while in time their children, if not they themselves, would build structured societies from these isolated settlements, they would not reproduce the texture of European life. In this the parallels are striking. Migrants on farms along Australia’s Murray, Darling, and Macquarie rivers experienced the same isolation and deprivation as settlers on the Mohawk, the Savannah, and the Mississippi, who came from the same British world; they developed the same sense of independence; the ordering of their lives was equally fragile; violence was similarly common; and they suffered similar kinds of despair. Patrick White’s The Tree of Man is a great novel, hence both unique and universal. But its elegiac portrayal of isolated suffering and of the evanescence of human achievement is something, I believe, shared by all the peripheral worlds. It is closer to Faulkner than to Galsworthy, to Melville than to Dickens.
Always the same squabbles, endless squabbles, passed down from generation to generation in endless lawsuits, in endless paying of fees, all to decide who owns some thornbush or other. The bush might get burned but they would keep right on quarreling. There was no way out of it. They could put aside twenty soldi a month, thirty soldi a month, even up to a hundred soldi in summer, and these might come in a year to make as much as thirty lire. But then some sickness would come along, or some other accident, and the savings often years would be eaten up. And then it would begin all over again, twenty soldi, thirty soldi, a hundred soldi a month. And then all over again. Ignazio Silone, Fontamara , pp. vii–x Part I considered the why , the reasons for this book. The tandem set of Parts II and III studied the where , the sources for this book. And now another tandem set, Parts IV and V, continues with the how , the methods to be used in this book. Presuming, from Parts II and III, the situation of oral and written traditions, of intracanonical and extracanonical gospels, of independent and dependent texts, what method should be used to focus on that first continuation from before to after the execution of Jesus? Since gospels openly and honestly proclaim themselves as written from faith to faith for faith, how can I do historical reconstruction without it becoming either apologetics or polemics, without it turning history into theology, or turning history against theology? That is the problem of the how , of the method . As I just mentioned, Parts IV and V are a linked pair. Part IV looks at the problem of methodology and then begins presentation of my own interdisciplinary method based on cross-cultural anthropology. Part V continues that presentation, building atop the anthropological basis with, first, Judeo-Roman history and, then, Lower Galilean archeology. I emphasize in those two parts how the three interdisciplinary layers lock together at the point of Roman urbanization and rural commercialization in early-first-century Lower Galilee. Part IV has two chapters. Chapter 10 is about methodology—that is, about the logic of my method. Why do I use this one rather than some other? I remind you, with an example at the start, about the nature of a gospel and about the need for any method to proceed from decisions about the nature of our sources. Finally, I end that chapter with an introductory outline of my own method. Chapter 11 establishes the basic substratum of that interdisciplinary method in cross-cultural anthropology. What can we say about agrarian empires and peasant societies, about class and gender, about resistance and leadership, from cultural and social anthropology? What general expectations can anthropology establish, within which particular historical forces and individual archeological discoveries must be located and processed? A word about the epigraph on early-twentieth-century Italian peasants. It describes only the good times.
Indeed, our worship of restricted and incomplete disease models can be viewed as a kind of ritual or magical practice in itself.* A disease is, to put it bluntly, between me, my doctor, and a bug. Something is wrong with my body, and I take it to a doctor to be fixed. What is lacking in that picture is not just the entire psychological but, much more important, the entire social dimension of the phenomenon. How have I been trained to think of my body, modern medicine, and doctors? How does my dysfunction involve my family, my job, or, in some cases, wider and wider levels of society? Disease sees the problem, unrealistically, on the minimal level; illness , realistically, on the wider level. Think, for example, of the difference between curing the disease or healing the illness known as AIDS. A cure for the disease is absolutely desirable, but in its absence, we can still heal the illness by refusing to ostracize those who have it, by empathizing with their anguish, and by enveloping their sufferings with both respect and love. A second formulation of that distinction comes from Arthur Kleinman. A key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotomy between two aspects of sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease. Illness includes secondary personal and social responses to the primary malfunctioning (disease) in the individual’s physiological or psychological status (or both)…. Viewed from this perspective, illness is the shaping of disease into behavior and experience. It is created by personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease.* Seen from those perspectives, the leper who met Jesus had both a disease (say, psoriasis) and an illness , the personal and social stigma of uncleanness, isolation, and rejection. And as long as the disease stayed or got worse, the illness also would stay or get worse. In general, if the disease went, the illness went with it. What, however, if the disease could not be cured but the illness could somehow be healed? This is the central problem of what Jesus was doing in his healing miracles. Was he curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? I presume that Jesus, who did not and could not cure that disease or any other one, healed the poor man’s illness by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization. Jesus thereby forced others either to reject him from their community or to accept the leper within it as well. Since, however, we are ever dealing with the politic body, that act quite deliberately impugns the rights and prerogatives of society’s boundary keepers and controllers. By healing the illness without curing the disease, Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way subversive to the established procedures of his society.
But does that change the general picture of peasant exploitation in Galilee? What, in other words, is the relationship between ceramic production and agricultural land? Does the peasant potter deliberately and willingly abandon the life of peasant farmer for the presumably more lucrative possibilities of entrepreneurial activity? That is not exactly what the cross-cultural anthropology of pottery seems to indicate. Recall, from above, the position of artisans as “dispossessed peasantry” according to the Lenski-Kautsky model. It is against that background that I read Arnold’s thesis “that there are certain universal processes involving ceramics that are tied to ecological, cultural or chemical factors. These processes occur in societies around the world and can provide a solid empirical (as opposed to speculative) base for interpreting ancient ceramics. On a more modest scale, the book presents cross-cultural regularities which relate ceramics to environmental and non-ceramic cultural phenomena…. [and answers] the question why does pottery making develop in an area and why does it evolve into a full-time craft” (ix–x). His book presents, in other words, a cross-cultural anthropology of pottery making: “The book will attempt to provide cross-cultural generalizations about the relationship which can be applied to many different societies in the present and the past…. By deriving generalizations from modern cultures, it is possible to understand and explain how ceramics articulate with the rest of culture and environment. By applying these generalizations to the past, it is possible to develop a more precise interpretation of how archaeological ceramics relate to an ancient environment and culture” (16). But if you map the material descriptions from Adan-Bayewitz against the ceramic anthropology of Arnold, you arrive at very different social conclusions. The systems of ceramic production move, according to Arnold, from household production, through household industry and workshop industry, into large-scale industry. In reading the following descriptions, notice how population pressure and the concomitant loss of subsistence farming force peasant farmers to become peasant artisans. They are not drawn to that change by entrepreneurial opportunity but are forced to it by agricultural necessity . That is the crucial point for me. Types of Ceramic Production . The first type of ceramic production is household production . “All adult females have learned the craft and have the same potential to make pots” (226). Each home makes its own pottery for itself, and since females are tied to the home by children, they are the potters. The second type is household industry . “Population pressure forces men into the craft and the social position of the potters thus decreases because of their limited access to or ownership of agricultural land …[and it] also forces farmers to go further and further away to obtain suitable agricultural land…. At a distance of 7–8 kms … travel to their fields becomes uneconomic and people may prefer to exploit resources like ceramic raw materials closer to their homes….
They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked. (Mark 14:50–52) [Jesus] asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.” (John 18:7–9) Two radically different interpretations of the same event. Mark describes the Son of God almost out of control, arrested in agony, fear, and abandonment. John describes the Son of God in total control, arrested in foreknowledge, triumph, and command. Death . If we turn to the ending of the passion in Mark and John, we find exactly the same process. The moment is the same in each, the last words of Jesus on the cross just before his death: Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. (Mark 15:34–37) After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:28–30) In Mark the bystanders mistake Jesus’ last words by taking “Eloi” for “Elijah” and derisively attempt to keep him alive for a few extra minutes to see if the prophet comes to his aid. The drink is their own mocking idea. In John, of course, there is no cry of desolation and no mockery, and the drink is Jesus’ idea and brought at his command. For Mark, the passion of Jesus starts and ends in agony and desolation. For John, the passion of Jesus starts and ends in control and command. Both speak, equally but divergently, to different times and places, situations and communities. Mark’s Jesus speaks to a persecuted community and shows them how to die. John’s Jesus speaks to a defeated community and shows them how to live. Neither of those accounts is history of what actually happened. Each is gospel— but for different situations and communities. But my point is this.
This dichotomy is, of course, in many ways a false one, but at the very least the presuppositions of anthropological archaeology, drawn largely from prehistory, must be examined and applied both critically and selectively to the archaeology of the Near East, which has a history , based both on artifactual remains and an abundance of literary sources, going back 5,000 years” (15, 21). The most adequate answers come from an interdisciplinary conjunction of all three factors—from anthropology, history, and archeology together. Anthropology tells us what to expect from peasants under rural commercialization. Archeology tells us about rural commercialization through Antipas’s urbanization processes in Lower Galilee in the early first century. History tells us something like this, from Keith Hopkins, introducing a book of essays specifically on trade in the ancient economy: “In the first two centuries AD , proportionally fewer food-producers were growing more food than ever before for more non-agricultural producers…. Agricultural productivity increased, above all because of the increased pressure of exploitation. Two types of exploitation need to be distinguished. First, agricultural slaves were forced to work longer than free men and were given, on average, more land to work than many free peasants could afford to own. Secondly, free peasants and owners of slaves were forced to work harder in order to produce taxes for the state, and in a significant minority of cases to produce rent for the legal owners of land which they worked…. [T]he total amount and the proportion of total production extracted from primary producers in taxes and in rent increased. In other words, the screws of exploitation tightened” (1983:xvi, xvi–xvii, xix). But history also tells us that the Jewish people believed in a covenantal God of justice and righteousness, in equity and equality in a land that belonged to God. When that anthropology, that history, and that archeology come together, we have the situation of Lower Galilee in the 20s of the first common-era century—as sharply as it can be defined. Peasants and Scribes The Gospel of Thomas and Q share the following social features: literacy and a scribal mentality, a probable setting in village or town life, a group organization that did not entirely withdraw from the larger world of which it constituted a part, and a group mentality characterized more than anything else by the adoption of a particular understanding of the world and a corresponding ethic. Moreover, both documents were composed in a context in which increased exploitation of the countryside and peasantry by the urban elites contributed to considerable social disintegration and economic distress (such as debt, dispossession, tenancy, impoverishment, and hunger). Both groups respond to this crisis by adopting a highly critical stance towards ordinary social conventions and political structures, a critique of wealth, an inversion of normal values, and a rejection or critique of urban-based religious institutions. William E. Arnal, “The Rhetoric of Marginality,” pp.
A real pattern of exploitation dialectically produces its own symbolic mirror image within folk culture…. The radical vision to which I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enormous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions of which they partake…. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is possible to describe some common features of this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. Where religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition of rank and status may well include the elimination of religious hierarchy in favor of communities of equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in common and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. The envisioned utopia may also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as well as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred will disappear. While the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation of the future, it often harks back to a mythic Eden from which mankind has fallen away” (1977:224–226). The second point is the distinction, at either end of a continuum, between overt and covert resistance. This is an extremely important distinction, because open resistance by insurrection or revolt is only the tip of the iceberg. It is, however, all that gets into the record kept by the elite, since hidden resistance is, by definition, something those in power are not supposed to recognize. “Most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal…. For all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions—let alone revolutions—are few and far between. The vast majority are crushed unceremoniously…. For these reasons it seemed to me more important to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance—the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These … forms of class struggle … require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority…. When such stratagems are abandoned in favor of more quixotic action, it is usually a sign of great desperation” (1985:xv–xvi).
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
At one point I dream I’m picking up a child’s stuffed animal—a Beanie Baby of the type Dev collected as a kid. In my dream hand, I look down, and the stuffed toy has morphed into a pit viper. With its triangular head, it lunges at my face. I scream myself awake and sit up and see—with eyes wide, a night terror—snakes lunging from the bed’s tufted headboard. Sweaty, heart rattling against my ribs, I look at the digital clock—just after three in the morning I’d gone to bed about two. I pull on running shorts, then tie on a pair of sneakers, thinking that a few miles of road will bang the ugly out of me. Instead, I lie facedown on the carpet, repeating the prayer about God taking my will. Speaking it, I feel the words sucked from my mouth into a vacuum where God is not. My head’s a hurricane, and to pray at all is like screaming into a gale. Lying there, I remember the Scriptures I’ve forgotten for days. Margaret specifically gave me two passages, saying, While I was praying this week, these pieces came to me. I’m very strongly guided to give them to you. How touched I’d been when she handed them over, but I hadn’t picked them up. I find in Mother’s still-boxed books a Bible, floppy and old, its binding cracked and peeling like a batwing. Opening it, I see Mother’s name carefully inscribed: For Charlie Marie Moore, from her loving Mother Mary, Christmas 1927 . I flip through the onionskin pages to my first assignment, verses seven through twelve of Psalm fifty-one. What I see makes the skin of my scalp prickle, for the lines are marked in pale blue chalk. A child’s hand has drawn a wavy line in the margin—not across the whole psalm, only alongside the lines I’ve been steered to—verses seven to twelve, which very deliberately traverse two sections of verse from the middle of one to the other. Kneeling, I sit back on my feet and feel the flesh on my scalp creep. I read the words. (Later, I’ll learn this is the hanging psalm read to English prisoners as they approached the gallows.) 7 True I was born guilty, a sinner even as my mother conceived me. 8 Still, you insist on sincerity of heart; in my inmost being teach me wisdom. 9 Cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be pure; wash me, make me whiter than snow. 10 Let me hear sounds of joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. II 11 Turn away your face from my sins; blot out all my guilt. 12 A clean heart create for me, God; renew in me a steadfast spirit. How odd, I think, for I never thought of Mother as particularly devout in childhood—she wasn’t. But it seems vaguely significant still. Only when I flip to my second assignment—St.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
11 In Search of Incompetence I don’t drink every day, but I find myself unpredictably blotto at inopportune times. Like the night before my thirtieth birthday: I lie fully dressed—albeit shoeless—in a charcoal business suit in the bathtub of a Silicon Valley motel, sipping whiskey from one of those minibar bottles that makes you pucker your lips into a doll’s pinhole mouth. On the shag rug, the legal pad with notes for my all day corporate presentation tomorrow holds a single x and y axis drawn into an L-shaped graph. To say I’m ill prepared understates the problem. My sole plan is to: (1) stride into the boardroom; (2) smile like a monkey as I briskly shake hands. Then I imagine a diaphanous veil falling across the rest of my presentation. I lie in the cold bath as in a tomb. From the outer hallway comes a ruckus that works on my brain like an eggbeater. Much of the Loyola men’s basketball team is running hither and yon, playing some game with a tennis ball. Every now and then they hurl the ball against my hollow-core door. This is not an accident. Earlier tonight, with rabid expression and possibly some spit spray, I told the team they had to keep it down or I’d call the front desk. They froze and stared as if some bog creature had reared up from the mud. The instant I closed the door, the game resumed at full decibel level. The rusty old clerk who came to rescue me had a dowager’s hump that kept him bent over at ninety degrees. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the ballplayers arrayed behind as he said, We’re full tonight. I can’t move your room. Then he turned on his heel and hightailed it through the gauntlet of giants back to the elevator, which two looming guys were holding open. Against the hotel door, the tennis ball occasionally whams, shaking the door earthquakelike on its hinges. If they could bust in, they’d throw me on a bonfire and torch me, I know it. They must sense the pitiful failure I’m mired in: turning thirty, far from home and family, making it up as I go. Worst of all, I’ve failed to publish a book, which means my ancient fantasy of being a writer has abraded off like the name on a wind-worn tombstone. I unscrew the tiny bottle of vodka’s red lid and suck a few drops. Every asshole I know has published a book. Over six years, I’ve collected rejections for my manuscript, sometimes the occasional nice note for second place. So a sheaf of dog-eared pages curling at the edges lies on my desk like drying roadkill, though every dang poem in it has come out in some literary mag, which is—as Warren points out—not nothing.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I’ve cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper’s sagging from the vaporizer’s work, but fresh steam is his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower. But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on.
But no amount of apologetics can conceal what their intensity only confirms. With regard to the body of Jesus, by Easter Sunday morning, those who cared did not know where it was, and those who knew did not care. Why should even the soldiers themselves remember the death and disposal of a nobody? Still, Matthew 27:19 records that Pilate’s wife had troubled dreams the previous night. That never happened, of course, but it was true nonetheless. It was a most propitious time for the Roman Empire to start having nightmares. Chapter 7How Many Years Was Easter Sunday?WHEN NARCISSUS DIED , the flowers of the field were desolate and asked the river for some drops of water to weep for him. “Oh!” answered the river, “if all my drops of water were tears, I should not have enough to weep for Narcissus myself. I love him.” “Oh!” replied the flowers of the field, “how could you not have loved Narcissus? He was beautiful.” “Was he beautiful?” said the river. “And who should know better than you? Each day, leaning over your bank, he beheld his beauty in your waters.” “If I loved him,” replied the river, “it was because, when he leaned over my waters, I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.” Oscar Wilde, “The Disciple” (quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde [New York: Knopf, 1988]) Charisma AS A TERM expresses less a quality of person than of relationship; it contains the acceptability of a leader by a following, the endorsement of his personality, and the social endowment of power…. Charisma is a sociological, and not a psychological concept…. [It] expresses the balance of claim and acceptance—it is not a dynamic, causally explanatory, concept; it relates to an established state of affairs, when the leader is already accepted, not to the power of one man to cause events to move in a particular direction. Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest Among Tribal and Third-World Peoples (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) The Living Jesus What happened after the death and burial of Jesus is told in the last chapters of the four New Testament gospels. On Easter Sunday morning his tomb was found empty, and by Easter Sunday evening Jesus himself had appeared to his closest followers and all was well once again. Friday was hard, Saturday was long, but by Sunday all was resolved. Is this fact or fiction, history or mythology? Do fiction and mythology crowd closely around the end of the story just as they did around its beginning? And if there is fiction or mythology, on what is it based? I have already argued, for instance, that Jesus’ burial by his friends was totally fictional and unhistorical. He was buried, if buried at all, by his enemies, and the necessarily shallow grave would have been easy prey for scavenging animals.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat First you wake in disbelief, then in sadness and grief and when you wake for the last time, the forest you’ve been looking for will turn out to be right in the middle of your chest. —Dean Young, “Side Effects” One evening after I’ve dropped off some final files to the big-deal telecom consultant I once worked for, I lounge with him and his wife on their patio under a sprawling oak. In the spirit of farewell to my goofy career as a telecom marketer in business, he takes down a double album cover and begins to roll a joint. We hardly do this—not since grad school—he says, but you deserve a send-off. Ten days without a drink at this point, I say no. His wife has a crystal wineglass in her hand and a winning grin. Sure you don’t want some? she says. The sculpted garden spreads around us, neat as a plate of sushi. She has on a gauzy black dress, and as she takes the joint and tokes it, she drapes her long legs over the garden chair, saying, This is very different from drinking, right? I mean...She trails off into an exhale. I think, It is different. Pot was never my problem—true enough—compared to the all-day bong-blowing, resin-scraping drug dealers I’d lived with— true enough. I view my hand reaching for the joint as if on a movie screen. The sober part of myself is vanished entire. The coal on the burning stick flares as I draw on it, then I hold the sweet smoke as it creeps up my spine to my brain stem, where a tight-closed lotus starts to flower open. Exhaling, I blow away all those creepy people from the church basement. The wind wafts them off into summer dust motes. Later, my friends tuck me in a car, then stand, their arms waving side to side with the liquidy motion of seaweed while I ease off. I roll the window down so my hair streams along the side. The edges of the road have softened, the trees are giant scrambles of green fuzz. Just past the Star Market, right before the road splits to wrap around the local pond, my left blinker clicks on of its own volition, and my car tires cant to cut across the traffic. The vehicle surges into the liquor store parking lot. Ten days clean at this point, I tell myself I’ve straightened out, and a little wine with dinner won’t hurt.... Waking up with the outline of Warren’s back—all I ever see of him—I feel soldered to the bed, with cobwebs yards long grown from head to floor. For an instant I convince myself the binge was an awful dream. Then the tinny taste in my gummed-up mouth floods me with self-loathing. So I find myself in the shit-brown aluminum chair again.